


Bloody lips and dangerous minds

by Lonelydevil



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), Batman - All Media Types, Suicide Squad (2016)
Genre: Antisocial Personality Disorder, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Dark Humor, Depression, F/M, PTSD, Self-Harm, Suicide Attempt, Violence, mental health
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:22:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 24
Words: 59,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26251114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lonelydevil/pseuds/Lonelydevil
Summary: At 15 Elsa Rinaldi is Kidnapped by the infamous Joker.5 months later she is found almost beaten to death.6 years later the Joker comes back for her once he learns she survived.Maybe not everything is as it seems. Maybe she makes him more human. Maybe he makes her feel free.
Relationships: Batman/OC, Joker (DCU)/Harleen Quinzel, Joker/OC
Comments: 14
Kudos: 33





	1. Prologue

The first time Elsa Rinaldi saw a dead body, she was 5 years old. Too young, some would argue and she´d have agreed with them but you see, when your father is one of the most important mafia bosses in Gotham, that´s bound to happen sooner or later. The memory was engraved in her mind, it all started with her pit bull puppy who had been restless that night, scratching her and whimpering so she decided to open the door of her room so he could go and bother her brother but when her sleepy brain realized the tiny dog had darted straight to her father´s study, the one they had been warned not to go into hundreds of times, she went after him.

“Come back here or you´ll get me in trouble!” she had whispered in her high pitched toddler voice.

But it was too late, the dog had already gone into the study and so she resigned herself to having to enter as well but just as she was about to push the door which hadn´t been correctly locked, her father came out with the dog in his arms and covered in ketchup or at least that´s what she thought it was until she realized the difference in color and texture between one of her favorite condiments and the substance on her father´s clothes and face.

“Papa…?” she´d muttered, suddenly scared.

He´d been wearing a deep scowl on his face and his eyes were blazing with fury but as soon as he saw the little offender was his daughter, he forced his features to appear only mildly disappointed.

“Go back to sleep sweetheart, daddy´s taking care of business”, he said handing her the trembling puppy.

“But… but…”, her tiny brain ran out of words after one of her father´s employees opened the door further saying something about the business being over but her eyes came to rest on the bloody prone figure on the study´s floor.

“Damn it, Pazzi!”, her father cursed taking his daughter in his arms and bringing her face to his chest so she wouldn´t see the dead body without realizing he was staining her clothes and face with the blood on his own shirt that had been white at the beginning of the meeting.

When they got to his little princess´s room, she was shaking so hard her teeth were chattering and he had to change his unresponsive daughter into clean pajamas and dab at her face with a wet towel until all traces of blood were gone. Her small brain was trying to process why that man had been so still and covered in blood.

“Is that man dead, papa?” she asked him after almost ten minutes of silence.

“Yes, sweetheart”, he answered firmly, not seeing the point in lying to her after what she´d seen. “But he was a bad man”.

“Did you kill him?”, when he nodded she ten asked, “Are you a bad man, papa?”

His eyes opened wide, startled by her wise question.

“We all have flaws, Elsa”, was his curt reply wishing she´d go back to sleep so he could put an end to the conversation.

“Are you going to die as well?”

“Don´t worry your pretty little head, I´m going to be in this world for a very long time”.

“But what if another bad man kills you?”

“I´ll make sure to get him first so no one can take me away from you”.

He went to tuck his daughter in but she moved away from him in her tiny violet bed and rolled to her side so her back was to him. He raised his eyebrows at the cold gesture but thought nothing at first, she was only upset, that was all, it would pass.

“Do you want papa to stay here with you until you fall asleep, honey?” he asked her, hopeful.

“No, you can go now”. He stood up feeling hurt that his daughter had refused an offer she would have squealed at just the night before. “And lock the door”, she told him, something shed never requested before and this surprised him.

“Are you sure Elsa? Won´t you be scared of the dark?” he was uncertain and worried.

“I´ll be fine”.

So the big and scary mafia boss was left with no choice but to comply with his daughter´s demands although that didn´t stop him from staying outside her door for almost two hours more in case his little angel had a nightmare after what she´d seen. The next day everything seemed to be okay with Elsa but nevertheless he decided to take her on a father-daughter to do some damage control. After all, she was still a five-year-old and she could blurt it out at any given moment and even though his wife knew about his activities, he still had to look out for Rudy, his seven-year-old son who understandably, knew nothing about the family business. Rinaldi was no psychologist but after having tortured people for so long, he´d learned to identify the telltale signs that indicated someone was lying to him but he didn´t spot any of them in his daughter´s demeanor, so after three hours of driving in the car to get ice cream and then a walk in the park, all the while grilling her with questions, he decided she´d taken the news astoundingly well and was happy he wouldn´t have to employ a shrink. They made a pact that day that she would never speak of what she´d seen the previous night again, only to him and only in private. She was not to discuss it with her mum and least of all with Rudy. For her part, she was happy to get the upper hand on her big obnoxious brother ¡, even if it was to be kept a secret, which only made it even cooler.

From that day on, father and daughter strengthened their bond and although they didn´t talk about the incident much over the years and she never caught him red-handed again, she was glad when she allowed her to start martial arts training at the tender age of ten, at the same time as her brother who was twelve at the time. The instructor never gave them a reprieve and was extremely hard on them, seeking to develop all their potential and so they sparred in all kinds of ways, from hand to hand combat to wooden sticks that left nasty welts all over their bodies. And they didn´t only learn martial arts, their father thought it crucial that their kids be fluent in at least three languages and that they learn how to handle weapons and go through survival training as well as hundreds of other little things to ensure the Rinaldi kids would never be bored. Their mother wasn´t too happy with their sport inflicted injuries but taking into account her husband´s particular brand of work, deemed it necessary to ensure her kids would never be unprepared but it still hurt when her children came home covered in mud and bruises.

Elsa relished her training and obeyed it rigorously, soon becoming the best out of the two siblings. She was fast, agile and had a lithe body, she was extraordinarily well versed at lying and so could hide sensitive information even under duress. She was also really pretty which made her a very valuable asset as people often underestimated her and she developed a habit of always carrying a knife on her. She was always prepared, always alert and always willing to jump in the face of danger. She was focused on her goal which was to inherit her father´s business and because of that she had already partaken in meetings between the mafia bosses. Her brother Rudy was happy to leave the intellectual part to her, that´s not to say he wasn´t smart, he could be incredibly cunning when he needed to but he preferred the physical part of the job and so was content with letting her baby sister make the calls as long as he was there to back her up as her personal bodyguard. At seventeen he was a tall and built young man who was no stranger to girl’s bodies and their mysteries. That was his fatal weakness, the mistake that nearly cost his sister´s life.

The fatidic day that his sister was taken by the Clown Prince of Crime would forever be engrained in all of the Rinaldi´s memories.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first story. I hope you'll like It!!!


	2. Lavender dress. Violet suit

We had been hosting one of my mother´s balls and we all looked dashing, or at least that´s what she said. While dad was taking care of business in the soundproof cellar, Rudy had been entertaining two ladies who seemed anxious to look under his tux at once in his upstairs bedroom. My mother and I were left then to act as the perfect hostesses, taking care of all our guests and making sure all their needs were met which involved a lot of small talk and fake smiles and too tight dresses. How I despised these kinds of events, especially when they were held at our house which meant I had no hopes of escaping without being missed. I was hiding my signature blade in my heels, having woken up with a strange feeling that day and I was just about to eat a small cucumber sandwich when three gunshots rang in the air. People started running and screaming and the quartet stopped playing as well, they were all scrambling to get to the doors but they turned out to be blocked by men dressed in black with clown masks and everyone in Gotham knew what that meant so the panic increased.

“Damn it, I was hungry”, I cursed when one of the guests run past me making me drop my tiny sandwich. So much for manners.

I thought about stabbing him in the back but then shook my head, too many witnesses.

“Well, well, well”, said a high-pitched voice. “Seeing as I didn´t receive and invitation, I decided to instead crash the party”.

“Thank God”, I muttered under my breath, “these shoes were killing me”.

Everyone recognized the voice of the infamous Joker and some of the guests started whimpering and sniffling as they knew their probabilities of getting out alive had drastically plummeted. My blood was singing, charged with adrenaline thanks to the fight or flight response. If the Joker was here, it meant he was after my father who hadn´t come up yet which meant I´d have to find my family and flee using one of the secret passageways the mansion hid. I was trying to locate my mother when her cry pierced the room, instantly I started pushing through the panicked flock, not caring if I elbowed rich people in the ribs. Along the way I had to stop to take off my shoes after extracting the blades from them and when I finally made it out of the throng of people, I realized I should´ve brought my gun because the person holding my mother by the hair was none other than the main act in the crazy circus himself.

Of course I´d heard about the Joker´s exploits before and his legendary feud with Batman and of course I´d seen pictures of the man but seeing him in my house in real life standing in the middle of a sea of scared people was a whole other story. His dyed green hair was tousled and wild but not unkempt and not too long, he had no trace of stubble and he was wearing his signature grease paint which accentuated the hideous Glasgow smile. He was wearing a violet tux with a red vest and a burgundy shirt which looked good even if I would have never gone for that color scheme myself. The clown looked extremely confident and at ease seeing as he was holding the gangster´s wife to him and none of our bodyguards would dare shoot him. I´d seen some of them go downstairs to search for my father but they hadn´t reemerged yet and Rudy was nowhere in sight so that meant it was all up to me.

“Where´s the big bad wolf?” he cackled, ecstatic. “Where is he when his wife most needs him? Fucking some girl half his age?” He pulled on my mother´s hair and she cried out.

Stepping out into the circle the Joker occupied, I bellowed: “Let her go!”

His eyes zeroed in on me and for a second there I lost my confidence under his glare, my mother´s horrified eyes and everyone´s stare. I tried to mold my features into a worried frown while looking at my mother but I didn´t know if I had managed to pull it off.

“And who might you be, little one?” he asked me with a semblance of interest.

“Elsa Rinaldi”. His eyes gleamed as he came a step closer to me, which I was counting on, dragging my mom in front of him.

“Oh, so you´re the daughter”, he eyed me up and down, devouring me with his murky eyes. “I must say, you are a beauty”. There was no lasciviousness in his tone.

“Let my mom go”, I said, hiding my blades in the palm of my hands and the long sleeves of my dress. “It´s my father you want, it´s weal to go after the spouse”.

“Weak, you say!” he snarled, coming closer.

I, too, took a step forward and extended my hand to grasp one of my mom´s and surreptitiously passed her one of the blades. Her face betrayed nothing and the Joker didn´t notice either as his irate glare was focused on my smug face.

“Do you know how I got these scars, little one?”

My mother acted quickly and drove the knife into his right thigh, he let go of her momentarily and she was able to escape but he didn´t stay stunned for as long as I would´ve expected and went after her seconds after taking out the blade covered in his own blood from his leg. I went after him, slashing at his face with a screech but he was astoundingly fast and managed to slash at my arm drawing a line of blood from my wrist to my elbow. I knew I should have felt more pain but the adrenaline pumping through my veins wouldn´t allow it and so we went at it back and forth trying to tear each other to shreds. Normally my reaction times would have been faster but the dress reached my bare feet and it didn´t allow much freedom for me to move and so I got more scrapes than I usually do in a brawl. He managed to slash my left cheek and almost stabbed me in the stomach but I was able to stop the knife with my forearm where it became embedded and through the pain and the red spots in my vision I was able to stab him in the chest although nowhere near as deep as I would have liked the knife to go. His look of surprise was priceless and I managed a manic smile with my mouth dripping blood from my face injury. And even though he had his fair amount of scrapes and cuts as well, he answered my smile with a howl of laughter.

Gunshots rang in my ears, from his henchmen, from our bodyguards… it didn´t matter. Bodies fell to the floor and out of the corner of my eye I saw my brother diving into the fight with a gun of his own but my focus was centered on the violent sociopath who seemed to be appraising me while everything fell into chaos and mayhem around him. We were both breathing fast after the physical exertion of the knife fight and our respective injuries.

“Elsa!” exclaimed a voice at my back and instinctively I turned my back to the biggest threat in the room as it had been dad who had been calling me. Big mistake.

A second later, he had a gun to my head and a powerful arm coiled taut around my sternum, holding me close to his chest. His deep laugh rumbled in his chest and I could feel the vibrations through my back. His red lips pressed a sloppy kiss on my cheek that almost made me retch and he whispered in my ear:

“We´re going to have so much fun, little one, you and me”.

I couldn´t register his words, they sounded like a promise but also like a very dangerous threat and I was paralyzed, the knife in my arm was starting to sting and the sociopath at my back was running his nose up and down my neck as if he was sniffing it but I knew he was only doing it to irritate my father.

“I came here with the intention of killing you Rinaldi, but I think I´d rather take your beautiful daughter”. He let out another cackle right in my ear and I winced. “Come, little one, let me take you to your new home”.

At his words, my brain started working again and I promptly realized what was going to happen if I did nothing to stop it so I head-butted him and a splitting pain thundered across my skull as the blood gushing from his nose stained my platinum hair and dress. He laughed again, tightened his hold on me and struck my temple with the butt of his gun as his henchmen started shooting at our men again so we could make our escape.

“Careful there or I may have to bite you”, he threatened, draping me over his shoulder carelessly and then everything went black.


	3. Machine guns and despair

Dr. Harleen Quinzel was practically running to arrive on time for her appointment with her favorite patient in Arkham asylum. Her boss had called her into his office to remind her about the significance of the date, as if she could ever forget. Today, exactly six years ago, the Joker had kidnapped Elsa Rinaldi. He had warned her today could be an emotional day for him and therefore, he could be more volatile than it was normal for him. Harleen had acted concerned and promised she would be careful knowing all too well he wouldn´t hurt her, after all, she was the only psychiatrist he´d been agreeable to, all the others had run away scared after a few sessions with him but not her even though she was new at the asylum. She knew they had a connection and trusted him not to hurt her, emotional turmoil or not. The psychiatrist knew which topics to stay away from not to elicit a violent response and she was confident he was getting better although with him you could never know as he was mysterious and deceitful as he was sadistic and cruel. He was rough around the edges but with her he showed a not sweeter side per se, but he´d never hit her or been extremely harsh with the only doctor willing to help him.

The others had had their reservations about putting her in a room with him and two guards but in the end, seeing as nobody else was willing to do it themselves, the rookie who had studied all of his previous interviews as well as his files and possible diagnoses, had been sent into the proverbial wolf´s den and to everyone´s surprise, had come out unscathed. At least on the outside as Harleen Quinzel, or Harley Quinn as he liked to call her, had been through momentous change throughout all their sessions. She wanted to understand him, to discover all his secrets and he was too smart not to notice that and too manipulative not to take advantage of it. Little by little, he´d molded the woman over the span of two years into a subservient acolyte and he still laughed about it for hours in his padded cell. To him she was nowhere as thrilling and interesting as Elsa had been but she had access to the villains in Gotham and he had decided to end his reprieve on the city, his reign of terror would be never ending, little one or not.

The first thing she noticed when she entered the room was the distant look of her patient, his tongue was moving inside his mouth, tracing his scars from the inside of his cheeks, a sure sign he was deep in thought. His hands were stationary though, shackled to the metal table which was bolted to the floor.

“Good evening, Mr. Jay”, was her customary greeting and he just huffed, she couldn´t help but pout at that. “I see you´re in a mood today”.

He made an impatient noise with his mouth as if he was telling her to get on with it so he could go back to brooding. Harleen decided to take the session a bit further, feeling scorned.

“So, they warned me against bringing this up but I will anyway”, he liked it when she was bold. “I take it you know what day it is today”.

His almost black eyes turned to look at her in boredom.

“Harley, today you are exceptionally tiresome”, he announced, not bothering to speak in a high-pitched voice like he always did, especially with other people around.

“How do you feel about today? It´s significance, I mean”.

“It´s just another day at this dreadful place, nothing new”, he drawled out.

“You seem melancholic today if I may say so Mr. Jay”

He glared at her from the other side of the table, repositioning his wiry and extremely thin body so that it was fully facing her. Oh, he was getting angry. She gulped.

“I don´t care what you think Doctor. In fact, I don´t care about your daddy issues at all which have you especially prickly today. Did daddy call his sweet sweet daughter and forgot to mention how proud he is of you even though you can tell it´s a lie because you know he wanted you to become a lawyer? Is that it? ´Cause in that case I´m in no mood to pick up your broken pieces”.

Her eyes burned but she refused to cry in front of him. The blonde woman put her lab coat back o and closed her folder with all her notes. Just before standing up, she stated with all the venom she could muster: “I don´t know what you see in that girl Mr. Jay, she really is nothing special”.

At that, she turned around but before she could go very far, his hand had gripped her arm, he had made do of his restraints while she didn´t notice and now he stood in all his glory in front of her. His Glasgow smile was stretched impossibly tight in an effort to appear charming.

“What do you know about her? She was long dead before we two met”, in spite of his smile, she knew she´d pressed one too many buttons by the grip was growing more painful by the minute.

“She´s not dead”, she said, breaking protocol and telling him the truth.

“I killed her”, he said crushing her chin with his other hand.

“No, you didn´t. You certainly came close but she was able to recover”.

“Elsa is still alive?” For the first time ever he showed an emotion on his face and it wasn´t because of her, but she didn´t dwell on it too much as his grip was bruising. “Tell me everything you know”.

“I attended some of her therapy sessions while I was an intern at the psychiatric ward at Gotham´s hospital. It took almost two weeks for her to be able to get out of bed and then nearly a year more until she could walk properly. She underwent several surgeries and had to wear casts for a long time, then she had to do through all kinds of physical therapy and in the end, they assigned her a psychiatrist to help her deal with all the trauma”.

“How was she?”

“Wary of everyone, cold and distant, often times unresponsive. I believe she suffered from severe PTSD, she had panic attacks daily and horrible nightmares which she rarely talked about. They diagnosed her with depression and had to be heavily sedated at times when she tried to harm herself or even her family. Over all she was quietly defiant, she didn´t speak much and so the psychiatrists’ didn´t know what to do with her. I think she got a therapy dog to help with her anxiety and panic attacks and she was homeschooled as she couldn´t stand the pressure of facing her classmates. She isolated herself, her family was desperate”.

“So little Elsa survived after all, what a pleasant surprise”.

When she let out a small whimper as the pressure on her chin and arm was becoming unbearable, he let her go and caressed her face with the back of his hand and then told her in a deadly serious voice.

“Harley, I need you to do something for me”.

“Anything”, was her eager response, wishing he´d touch her again and he smiled like a fox.

“I need you to get me a machine gun”.

≈

The Joker´s escape from Arkham Asylum had understandably shattered the Rinaldi family. The patriarch had immediately upped the security in his estate as well as abroad where his two children lived. His wife was wringing her hands anxiously and looking at the phone on the coffee table placed between the two of them.

“She has a right to know”, repeated Thomas for what felt the thousandth time.

“But she´s been doing so well lately!” she protested again. “Rudy even said she´d made a friend at university, if we tell her she´ll fall back into old habits and I won´t lose my daughter again to that psychopath”.

“But she has to be on high alert from now on”.

“Then tell Rudy so he can do what he deems necessary to keep her safe, that was the whole point of sending them together, wasn´t it? To get them away from anything mafia related so she could get a free start with her brother to protect her”.

“Honey, it wasn´t your fault”, he said tactfully as the five-month kidnapping of their daughter was still a sore topic for them, too much guilt.

“No! It was our fault!” she exclaimed, getting up from her seat. “Yours for being involved in shady business and mine for not being able to defend myself and protect my very own flesh and blood. A parent should shield their kids from harm, not the other way around! If I´d continued training like you told me to, I wouldn´t have frozen on the spot and he wouldn´t have been able to use me as leverage to get to you and Elsa wouldn´t have had to come to my rescue and he wouldn´t have taken her”. She was panting by the time she finished her diatribe.

“We´ve been over this a million times and that doesn´t change the fact that she was still taken from us and then came back… changed”.

“Broken, she was broken, Thomas. And year by year she´s been getting better and I´m not willing to jeopardize her recovery just because that psychotic bastard managed to escape. The whole point of sending them abroad with fake identities and a bunch of undercover bodyguards was so they could become untraceable. We haven´t seen them in years and I refuse to think all that was for nothing”.

“We both know the Joker is extremely cunning and resourceful and he has a strange… fixation with Elsa”.

“He almost killed her!” his wife cried out with tears streaming down her face.

“Yes, but the reason he was caught in the first place was because he stayed with her for too long. You remember what Commissioner Gordon told us, Joker hadn´t acted like that before, he leaves his hostages alone, he doesn´t live with them for five months”.

“He only kept her alive to receive the ransom, he doesn´t harbor any kind of feelings for her, that twisted bastard can´t feel anything”.

Thomas exhaled and rubbed his temples with his fingers. His wife refused to accept what was right in front of her but he couldn´t afford to do the same, not in his line of work. He had to make a decision and so he took the phone ignoring his wife´s frantic gaze.

“Rudy, we have a problem”.


	4. Tingles and threats

It had been three months since Rudy Rinaldi, now Anthony Brown, had received a stern call from his father. He´d been in high alert ever since, not that he´d been slackening at work before, not where his little sister was concerned. Never again. His sole focus was her well-being so that meant no day offs, no alcohol and no distractions which included girls like the beauty walking side by side with her sister, Sarah Bates. In Amsterdam they were posing as friends, supposedly he´d already finished his degree but shared a boat house with Sarah and May, her Labrador and therapy dog. Sarah was studying business and seemed happy enough like that.

“What about you, Anthony?” Sarah´s friend asked, eyeing him with interest.

“Sorry?” he said going back to their conversation, he´d been too busy making sure all their undercover bodyguards were in place behind them. They all lived in the apartment building opposite their boat house which was stationary but that provided a good escape route in case of emergency.

“Sarah said she couldn´t go to the cinema tonight, I was asking if you´d be interested in going with me”.

“Oh, sorry, but tonight I´m busy”, she looked crestfallen.

“It´s okay. Well, see you in class Sarah, and I´ll see you around Anthony”, she walked away with a small smile.

“She likes you, and she´s quite pretty. I wouldn´t be mad if you left me alone for a few hours, I´d have the bodyguards across the street anyway”.

“You knew about them?” he turned to look at her, shocked.

“From the moment we boarded the plane two years ago”, she looked at him with a disbelieving expression. “I´m not stupid, you know and you and dad are so very predictable. Suffocating even”, she added as an afterthought, in a low tone of voice and he almost didn´t catch it.

“You feel suffocated?” he inquired worriedly as he stepped in front of her to place his hands on her shoulders. “Anything else? Anxiety? Panic?”

“See what I mean!” she said brushing off his hands. “You worry too much and it can get overwhelming at times. I don´t even get to walk alone, everywhere I go, someone´s always watching”.

“It´s for your protection”, he tried to make amends, she seemed upset and May was growing restless sensing her unease.

She huffed and kept walking ahead, adjusting the straps of her backpack which she never let him carry, insisting she may have a limp but she wasn´t useless. Suddenly, something brought her to a halt when she got to the wooden platform that lead to their floating house.

“What´s wrong?” he asked, looking over her head and realizing what had gave her pause. Their door was halfway open. “Stay here”.  
He got out his gun and went into the house hoping this was only a coincidence but the feeling of dread had already settled in his stomach and there was no way to stop all the horrible thoughts going through his head at that moment. He wouldn´t let them take his sister away from him, not ever again. He went into the house and searched room after room, the whole house had been ransacked and there were pillow feathers and broken glass from picture frames everywhere as well as broken lamps that had been smashed. His room was a complete mess but he had to search for his burner phone hidden in a secret compartment to warn his father. Seconds after he had put his gun down to kneel on the floor and start searching below the floorboards, one of them creaked behind him and before he could turn around, he received a blow to the head which rendered him unconscious.

≈

I was fuming, how dare he? After six years, my mind was clear again since I was no longer taking any pills that made my thoughts sluggish. I had decided on my course of action and now he had come here and ruined my master plan because I knew perfectly well who awaited me in the boat house, I felt that electric tingle in my spine that only made an appearance when he was near. It was nice to know that after six years, my body still reacted to him the same way, that I wasn´t completely useless at identifying threats. Rudy had gone inside guns blazing which meant he was either unconscious or dead at that point, served him well for his sheer idiocy. That left me with two options, either I went in too with my gun or my knife as I couldn´t handle two weapons at once with a useless hand or I could turn around and follow my plan as I had devised it, kind of, since my brother had already got himself killed. 

Just when I had decided facing the Joker without proper training was not a brilliant idea, May went berserk and ran into the house leaving me behind.

“Damn it!” I muttered kicking the ground like they did in films, it didn´t make me feel better.

So my decision had been made for me, I had no other choice but to go into the house because God help me, I did feel fond of that dog. I wasn´t about to abandon the only being I had warm feelings over behind, I wasn´t completely heartless after all. So I got out my gun figuring I wouldn´t have to be close to my assailants to fire and hoping I would be able to aim properly with my left hand. I wasn´t the selfless type, I´d never risk my life for anyone but I liked that dog, even when it ran into a house with a violent sociopath I had unfinished business with.

I went in, clutching the gun to my chest, careful to make as little sound as possible so as not to betray my position. The house was completely wrecked so it proved to be a difficult task as I tiptoed around broken glass. There was a trail of bloody footsteps that led from my brother´s room to the living room which meant he was injured or dead and the attacker was roaming the house while decorating the floor as well. How nice of him.

A pained whimper made my head turn around sharply and my feet led me to the kitchen, the tingle in my spine increased until I was almost buzzing. I was pressed against the wall, trying to get a look into the room while simultaneously not getting discovered which was a difficult feat to accomplish if I may say so myself. But my quiet calculations turned to dust when another pained whimper reached my ears followed by a thud of a body slamming against wood.

That´s when I entered the kitchen with my gun pointed at the henchman who had just kicked May only for a shot to ring close to my ear and find its target in that same man who slumped to the ground, decorating our house with his blood too. I heard him blow on the barrel of his gun a few feet behind me, I could almost see his arrogant smirk in my mind´s eye.

“Long time no see, little one”, his voice jarred me back into moving and just when I was about to pivot so I could face him, one of his hands found its way to my face with a handkerchief that had a pungent smell to it.

I didn´t register the impact when my body hit the ground, I did however register his raucous laugh that made my whole body shudder.


	5. Reunions and memories

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's mention of self-harm and suicide attempts in this chapter as well as torture.

I caressed her now black hair and got reacquainted with her smell, it had been too long since I had last seen her and she had become a few inches taller in that time but she looked gaunt and tired, she´d dyed her hair and was wearing clothes a few sizes too big for her. I picked her up and carried her to the boat we´d stolen and that was behind her house.

“Don´t forget the dog”, was my last order before closing the door to the only room in the belly of the boat.

Now that we were alone, the need to see how her body had changed during the six years they had told me she was dead, was nearly overpowering. I longed to see the tally marks she had on her groin where I had carved one with my knife for every time she had tried to escape. I had chosen that part of her body so only she could see them and be reminded of what I was capable of when I was cross with her. Plus, it was always exciting to watch her squirm in fear. The first time she had passed out thinking I was going to rape her but I was not a sexual offender, I hadn´t had time to tell her that before she had lost consciousness. It had been incredibly arousing to have her at my mercy since I thrived when I was in control but I knew I wouldn´t remove her clothes. What I had promised her back then, still stood to this date, I wouldn´t rape her or do anything remotely sexual unless she was a willing participant. 

I did take off her shoes and examined every inch of her face, tracing my fingers over her features, she trembled but didn´t wake up. After that, I took her hand, eager to follow the irregular lines she´d cut into her wrists years ago according to her files. I found the now whitish scars extremely fascinating but also somewhat out of place on both wrists of the strong-willed teenager that had not hesitated to come at me to protect her mother. I took ahold of her other wrist too and felt the need to lick her scars, see how the raised skin felt against my tongue but I held myself in check.

Black hair did nothing for her but on the other hand, the map of scars that covered both her forearms spoke of pain and blood and there was nothing that defined her better than that. I´d seen the pictures of the new additions to her body on her hospital files which Harley had had to translate for me as they were full of jargon but I´d still caught the gist of it: the young woman lying on the bed before me had spiraled into depression, attempted to take her life on numerous occasions which at least proved she was consistent, she´d scared away a large number of professionals like I had, she also had self-destructive mechanisms to cope with pain and suffered from anxiety and panic attacks. In other words, I wondered if the woman who had been through such a mental and physical ordeal would resemble the Elsa I´d known. I didn´t want nor did I have the patience to look after a broken individual such as the one the files described.

I was eager for her to wake up to see how she would react to my presence, whether she´d break down and beg for mercy in which case I would killed her on the spot or if on the other hand, she´d fight back like she´d always done and only then would I give her a fighting chance. It was all up to her and this thrilled me, only her spunk and smart mouth would save her. I cursed the pants she was wearing as I wasn´t able to take a peek at the surgical scars on her knee and thigh up to her hipbone right next to the tally marks. 

I´d have given anything to have been a fly on the wall the moment the medical staff peeled back her bloodstained clothes only to reveal healed marks on her groin. Had they wondered if they stood for each time I´d supposedly fucked her? I licked my lips imagining the surprised faces. How had her family reacted when they told them? Had they cursed my name or wept for the loss of innocence of their little girl? I´d been curious to see there was no report of a rape kit having been done which meant she hadn´t consented to it.

“Did you feel too violated already or did you just not want them to know what had or had not gone on behind closed doors?” I asked her still form. “How many times did you have to deny I´d raped you, little one? How many times did they ask? I bet not knowing was killing them, serves them right for turning you into the victim of your own story, I bet that must´ve stung. You who fought back, you who stood up to me when everyone else was too busy pissing themselves. I wonder, do you still remember things as they really happened or did they manage to convince you it was your brain´s defense mechanism? Did they make you doubt yourself?” 

I emitted a throaty chuckle, brushing my fingertips over the curve of her neck. Her skin was unblemished there even though I´d nicked it on countless occasions with my knives. She whimpered in dreams, her eyes moving below her eyelids which meant she was not having a peaceful dream and I entertained myself wondering whether she´d shout at me first thing when she woke up. I was looking forward to it.

≈

Meanwhile, I´d been thrown into a much more unpleasant and disturbing scenario. Sadly, I was able to recognize the abandoned warehouse I was in, it was where the Joker had nearly beaten me to death, it had played a dominant role in too many of my nightmares not to recognize it. The sequence of events was always the same: first, he shot the other three weeping girls that were tied with zip ties to chairs just like me, in the head, execution style and each time he let out a delighted laugh seeing their blood spray everything and everyone around them. We had been close, so dangerously close to freedom we could have almost tasted it but he was too damn intelligent and had found us in this hiding place. They had been abducted just three days prior to their terrible deaths and the four of us had decided our chances were better as a group and so that same night, I had sneaked out of my room and stolen the keys to their cuffs from one of the henchmen and we had all run like the devil himself was chasing us which wasn´t too far from the truth, even if they had different reasons for wanting to get away than I did. 

After a few hours of wandering around the Narrows, we had accepted we were completely lost and decided to rest until daylight so that we would be able to find our way out in the light of day. Wrong choice. They had come down on us and it wasn´t long until we found ourselves tied to uncomfortable chairs and with tears running down their cheeks, I had refused to cry. The Joker, of course, had taken his sweet time to reach the upper level where we were, so we could stew in our fear, mad clown with a streak of theatricality, all an intimidation technique. I knew there was no escaping my fate this time, there wouldn´t be a sixth tally mark, this time I´d taken it too far and by the look in Frost´s eyes, I knew I was correct in my assessment. I wouldn´t beg for mercy, I hadn´t expected to meet my end at the end of a crowbar either. 

After shooting the three girls, he´d taken the bar from one of his henchmen and hit me for the first time on my right hand, crushing and breaking my fingers and I´d screamed so loud I´d felt my vocal cords tear but when he took a swing to my left patella I screamed even louder. All throughout my torture he was laughing and jumping in glee as if our five months together meant nothing but then again, I knew who he was, he wouldn´t give me a quick death. The blows didn´t stop coming but I started to lose consciousness so in a way, it was a blessing. Sometimes he would wait for me to open my eyes but as the time dragged on, his viciousness took over and he stopped caring whether I was conscious or not. 

There was blood oozing out of my injuries and coming out of my mouth, I wasn´t able to breathe properly due to a punctured lung and when he hit me in the head, I finally toppled over to the floor and that´s where my recollection stopped.

I remember waking up in a hospital with my family around and feeling numb even though there were tubes and needles inserted in my body which was covered in bandages and casts. I vividly remember the blow of being told I wouldn´t be able to paint or draw again as I had lost complete feeling of two of my fingers in my right hand due to extensive neurological damage. The day they took the cast off my right leg and an angry red scar stood out in my tanned leg, when I realized I´d have a limp for the rest of my life, how I would never be able to run as fast again…

A myriad of memories assaulted my head now after seeing the clown again, memories I´d suppressed too, like pancakes and syrup and pasta in glasses, memories I´d buried because they didn´t match with what everyone else said I´d gone through. I recalled feeling angry and confused and how cutting myself made me feel marginally in control and so it became an addiction. I had no longer been able to maintain civil conversations with anyone, their eyes always drifting to my scars or healing bruises and cuts and so it had become easy to withdraw into myself and forsake human interaction plus the pills I´d taken for years made me feeel tired all the time so having dull conversations with my family had not been my idea of a good time either.

I couldn´t escape the nightmares or the shrinks, I only felt like myself when in pain and even then sometimes it wasn´t enough to outrun the shadow he´d cast over my life and that´s when I slit my wrists or submerged myself in a motel bathtub after having ingested one too many pills or tried to jump off a building… the list went on. In short, I had led a very miserable existence for the past six years.

I woke up gasping for breath.

His dark eyes were watching me intently and a chill run down my back, his eyes were still murky and spoke of madness and violence, I found it thrilling. My nose still felt funny due to the chloroform and my lips were swollen because of it too. He examined me as I watched him, finding he had undergone little change during the past six years. His cheeks stood out more in his face as did his collarbones which meant he´d lost more weight but apart from that, everything seemed the same. I could feel my knife pressed against my thigh which was reassuring, thank God for thigh holsters.

I was still a bit dizzy from the chloroform and I felt a pounding in my head which meant he had let me fall to the ground even though he had been right beside me which struck me as a very Joker thing to do. I wasn´t a fan of the vulnerable position I was in, laying down on the bed so I scrambled to at least sit down with my back pressed against the headboard. The rushed movement gave me motion sickness which was made worse by the lingering effects of the drug. I fought hard not to throw up, God only knew how he´d kill me if I threw up all over him.

“Glad to see they managed to make an honest man out of you at Arkham”, I grumbled, my vision a bit hazy.

He hummed in response and sat closer to me, his thigh brushing mine and quick as lightning, I dislodged the knife from its sheath and pressed it against his abdomen, which, incidentally, put me much closer to him. He didn´t react, didn´t move a muscle, his breath tickled my temple, warming my forehead. Our gazes were locked as we assessed the other. I wasn´t surprised to feel the cold bite of a blade against my navel.

I could faintly hear the sound of waves as they hit the hull of the ship in a slow, rhythmic pattern that did nothing to soothe me even though people often described them as calming. I was willing to bet those people hadn´t been with their former kidnapper when they made that idiotic statement. Was he going to drown me? Feed me to the sharks? A small sheen of perspiration appeared on my upper lip.

If it had been up to him, we´d have stayed locked in that position until the end of time but as it was, my hand was starting to grow numb so very slowly, not taking my eyes away from his, I withdrew my arm and placed it on my lap, knife still in a firm grip in case he tried something. He acknowledged my gesture by pocketing his own blade, eyes twinkling in mirth the whole time.

“When did you get out?” I asked, still feeling his breath play with my hair strands.

“Three months ago. I take it you didn´t get a heads-up”.

“It was nice of you to come tell me in person, though”, I replied, sarcasm dripping from my voice.

“I aim to please”, his grin was positively feral.

The ´how´ seemed pretty obvious, by killing everyone who stood in his way. The really pressing question here was whether or not he wanted to kill me, finish what he´d started six years ago but looking into those murky depths that were his eyes would not help me find an answer.

“Is May on the boat?” I asked instead.

“Doc´s with her”.

“He´s still alive?”

“No, his ghost is watching over your mutt”, ha ha, funny.

“She´s a Labrador, I´ll have you know”, I jutted my chin out proudly.

“I´ll endeavor not to make that mistake again, madam”, he made a mocking vow and I rolled my eyes.

“Make sure that you don´t”.

Either he was lying and May was not on board because if you were going to kill someone you certainly didn´t bring their dog along for the ride, or he was speaking truthfully and she really was behind the door to the room. Dying didn´t scare me, I just wanted to know what to expect so I asked him directly about it.

“Are you going to kill me for good this time? Is that it?”

Instead of answering me, he took off his suit jacket and his purple vest which left him in purple trousers and a white shirt. He then lay down on the left side of the bed and closed his eyes, hands resting on his flat abdomen.

“You´re unbelievable”, I huffed but knew I wouldn´t get anything out of him even if I pestered him which would only annoy him and I remembered what happened when he was pissed all too well.

“Are you going to kill me when you finally grow bored of me?” There was no sorrow in my voice, it had no inflection, in fact, cold as ice. 

He sighed again and opened one eye to look at me and then he threw out the arm closest to me and squeezed the knee where my surgical scars were, a bit too hard and I scrunched my face in pain. “Shut up, Elsa”, he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How did you like their interaction?


	6. The first promise

What ensued after being abducted the first time was an extremely uncomfortable ride in the back of the Joker´s van. The driver must´ve been going over all the potholes in the road because I was being tossed around, bumping against grouchy henchmen until their boss decided to take matters into his own hands and grabbed me by the waist. Being so close to him allowed me to inhale the scent that was peculiar to him and that I´d never associate with anything else but him. A pungent mix of motor oil, sweat, blood and madness. He leered at me and I rolled my eyes, if he hadn´t hit me in the head, I wouldn´t be so unsteady on my feet or if I had something to hold on. It wasn´t like I was pressed to him because I wanted to.

“Doc should take a look at your arm”, he told me and without forewarning, he got his knife out of my arm and I bit the inside of my cheek until I drew blood. I decided to return the favor by doing the same to him with my butterfly knife on his chest but he didn´t even flinch, instead he laughed. “Feisty”.

We rode like that the rest of the way, with me pressed to his chest, his arm around my waist while I looked at my injury trying to deduce whether I´d bleed out before this Doc could take a look at it. Suddenly the van stopped and we all lurched forward, he let me fall unceremoniously to the floor and I shot daggers at him. The doors opened and I found myself in a vacated mansion the Joker had taken over, probably the owners had gone to live in Gotham instead of the Narrows, where I was probably in right now. 

Doc turned out to be a man in his fifties, the oldest of the henchmen and the only one with medical knowledge as he was indeed a doctor who found working for the clown more profitable than doing it at a hospital. In time, I´d learn the Joker rarely took him out on jobs due to his age and so we would become close because I´d be often left behind-at first-as well. When the men returned, Doc would patch them up and I´d help him.

I´d also learn that the Joker´s men had a variety of mental illnesses, from schizophrenia to hallucinations to drug addictions which turned out not to be a problem as all kinds of illegal substances made their way into the hideout. At times he would also take on common criminals from thieves to rapists but to my surprise, he would also tell me to steer clear from the most dangerous or depraved of the lot and I appreciated it to no end although none of us ever acknowledged that special treatment.

He also made sure to eliminate those who came too close to me or overstepped, they would find their end on the next job. Again, we didn´t address that either but his right hand, Frost, did notice it and so would look after me as well. We´d play cards, have knife fights, competitions and all kinds of dangerously exciting games among us.  
After bandaging my arm, Doc led me to a room that had a four-poster king-sized bed in it and an ensuite bathroom. He told me they had a meeting with the Joker and then left, locking the door behind him.

I immediately started looking around the room for something witch which I could defend myself but the only other pieces of furniture were a closet with extravagant suits, a boudoir with grease paint in small containers and an old fashioned shaving razor, and finally there was a table with blueprints of buildings and bombs strewn all over its surface. The only window could not be opened so that option was closed to me, literally. The bathroom only contained the essentials as well as tons of green dye and I found three switchblades and a grenade among the bed sheets. I took one of the blades and then resigned myself to spending at least one night in the Joker´s room because it was obviously where I was. 

I took a quick shower, mindful of the door in case it opened and then I folded my lavender dress on a corner of the bed and decided I would have to put on his underwear as I didn´t fancy putting on used panties although I did put on my bra. Then I took a green shirt from one of the drawers and sat down to examine the papers on his table. I was not surprised to see blueprints of my house as well as pictures of my father. That´s how he found me when he finally decided to return to his room.

“Sneaking around, are we, little one?” he inquired leaning over me.

“This is wrong”, I ignored his question pointing at one of the blueprints. “The Iceberg lounge has one more underground floor. It´s where the Penguin tortures his prisoners”.

“And how would you know that?” he looked at me skeptically.

“No one pays attention to fifteen year olds and this one is very curious”

“Some would say nosy”, he bopped her nose making a ridiculous sound. “Anything else he keeps down there?”

“Tons of fish”, he actually snorted at that and I couldn´t help the small smile that stretched my lips.

“I see you´ve made yourself at home”, he commented, eyeing my ensemble.

“I need clothes and underwear”, I said.

I was no newbie at negotiation so with my wording I had conveyed I´d be staying with him for a while which meant I wouldn´t be dead.

“Anything else princess?” he asked, amused.

“Something to eat would be appreciated as well”.

He smirked and then produced an apple from the pocket of his pants. While he was busy undressing, I checked for tiny holes in it, in case he had injected something into it. I had broken his nose after all. After a thorough examination, I gave in to my hunger and bit into it. That´s when I saw him get in the bed in loose pants and a white t-shirt.

“Where am I supposed to sleep?” I asked him, finishing my apple in a rush. He patted the spot next to him and I huffed. “There´s no way in hell I´m sleeping with you”.

“I don´t bite. Unless you ask me to”, he winked at me.

“You go to bed with your paint still on? You´ll ruin the sheets”.

He didn´t answer, instead he tucked himself in and turned the lights off leaving me in the dark. Deciding I wasn´t going to lose the little pride I still had left, I got down on all fours and climbed onto the bed but stayed at the feet only to be kicked down by him.

“Hey!” I protested from the floor and he snickered.

In the end, I was forced to sleep on the floor using my dress as a pillow and freezing my ass off as he wouldn´t let me borrow any of the sheets either. It took me a long time to actually fall asleep even though I was exhausted from the recent events but getting stabbed in the dark was not one of my fantasies so I stayed alert. His breathing never seemed to slow down to the rhythm a sleeping person would have either so I was on edge. After all, I was lying inches away from the infamous Joker and he didn´t seem to be falling asleep either.

“I can hear your wheels turning”, he admonished me.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Not right now, no”

“But it´s still an option”

“Your point?” he sounded pissed off.

“I just want your word that you´re not going to kill me tonight so that I can sleep”

“Would you trust me to keep it?” he countered.

“Not really but I just want to hear you say it”.

“I promise whenever I plan to kill you, I´ll tell you in advance”.

“Thank you”, and strangely enough, I was comforted by his promise and was able to nod off.


	7. Cucumber

“Wake up”, his voice startled me. My whole body was sore from sleeping in such an uncomfortable position, it was a miracle I had even managed to catch some sleep on the same bed as him, that had never happened before.

I got up, rubbing the sleep from my eyes and followed him out of the boat only to get into a black car. His goons followed us on another car and Doc must´ve been there with May because the only people on our backseat were two big and smelly men I didn´t recognize and who offered us two wrapped hamburgers. On instinct, I opened one and took out all the cucumber and then I passed it to him, he noticed the gesture from the driver´s seat but said nothing. I ate mine distractedly, wondering how May was and praying Doc had fed her, if that dog died I´d be devastated. She had been trained since puppyhood to cater to all my needs and the last two and a half years with her had seen an improvement in my moods and self-harming tendencies. Without her by my side I felt uneasy and I hugged myself, putting the barely chewed on burger down. Joker disentangled one of his hands from the steering wheel and placed it on the back of my neck in what resembled a loving gesture when in reality he was squeezing my neck, the The message clear: eat. So I forced myself to eat more if only to relieve the pressure which had become painful after only a few seconds.

We arrived to a private hangar after forty minutes of crazed driving as it couldn´t be any other way with him. At least I´d put my seatbelt on. As soon as I got out of the car, I scanned the passengers from the other vehicle and was relieved when a pet carrier was extracted from the trunk. We made our way to the private jet and after seating down on one of the plush seats, Doc came over with my chocolate lab on a leash. She jumped on my lap and I kissed her head and little black nose.

“Thank you Doc, really”

“Don´t worry about it kid, she was frantic looking for you”.

He hadn´t changed much in the last six years, more grey hairs and wrinkles but his face still spoke of kindness.

“We´d never been apart before”, I explained.

“I´m sorry this is the only way I get to see you, kid”, he whispered, kneeling next to my seat. “I´m really glad to see you but the circumstances are not really merry”.

“I missed you too”. And I found I actually meant that statement I´d scoffed at my whole life because it had strike me as too sentimental. It was something you said to your classmates when you saw them again after a long holiday or what you said with a smile to your family who came to visit from Italy but it certainly was something I hadn´t meant. Until now.

The Joker coughed, a clear warning for those who knew him and Doc went down the aisle while the clown sat facing me. May was curious about him with all his peculiar smells and tried to climb down my lap to smell him but I held her tight. I preferred my dog alive, thank you very much. But her will was too strong and he probably still smelled of hamburger so she wiggled out of my arms and went to him.

“May!” I shouted-whispered.

Joker´s eyes were on the dog and I noticed than even though we were airborne, he hadn´t fastened his seatbelt which meant he´d be able to kill her without any restrictions of movement. He was quick to anger and lash out at perceived offences and my dog sniffing him would probably constitute one. May took notice of my pang of distress and came to me immediately, placing her paws on my arms so I wouldn´t be able to harm myself as she licked my face.

Standard therapy dog reaction even if the handler hadn´t showed outward signs of panic. She must know by now that I wasn´t wired like everyone else and so those little spikes of emotion were the only indicator as to how I was feeling and they weren´t very common or pronounced so that made her an even better therapy dog.

“Promise me”, I said under my breath, tone dead-serious. ”Promise me you won´t hurt her”, he was staring me down, tracing the inside of his scars with his tongue. “Joker, please”. 

The chloroform must have lowered my IQ because being so openly vulnerable to him never bode well and still here I was, pleading for him not to harm my dog.

“Oh, I do love it when you beg, sweetheart”, one of his goons snickered but I needed to get that promise out of him, maybe it was ill-advised but I trusted his promises.

“I´m serious about this. You can kill me if that´s what you want but May remains unharmed”.

“She´s just a dog”, he sneered but I was able to see through his nonchalant façade. He was carefully examining me and my reactions.

“Promise me”.

“Just make sure she doesn´t chew my shoes”. That was as far as he was willing to compromise in front of his men and that was okay with me.

“Boss, I think Harley is allergic to dogs”, said one of the henchmen at my back.

“She´ll have to put up with it”.

“Who´s Harley?” I asked.

“A new addition”, was his curt reply.

“Harley will give this one a run for her money”, muttered one of the men but it was loud enough for me to hear and the Joker had too, because his eyes darted to me for a second.

“Should I be worried about her?” I whispered so low only he could hear.

“Can you shoot with your left hand?” So he´d read my medical files.

“I´ve been closely monitored for six years, the closest I came to a fight were self-defense classes and even those were only here in Amsterdam and we did not fight with knives, I assure you”.

“Frost will have to catch you up then”. So he was still alive too, that was good.

“Is she dangerous?”

“I hope so”, his grin became creepier.

“Since you last saw me…” I swallowed, exposing my weaknesses was never a good idea with him but I felt this was necessary,”… I´m no longer as fast or have the same stamina”.

“I´m not going to be your babysitter, if that´s what you´re getting at”.

“So I´m going to die at twenty-one and I´ll be killed by an individual named Harley. Well, it´s been a good run, kind of, mostly, actually it´s been complete shit to be honest”, I muttered to myself.

“Just lay low and keep to yourself”, which meant I couldn´t trust this batch of henchmen, "stick to Doc or Frost. I´ll handle Harley”, in all likelihood he was only saying that to create a false sense of security so Harley could catch me unawares.

“Just make sure she goes to a good family when I´m cold and stiff and start to rot”, I told him, looking at the pup that was at my feet. “And make sure my body reaches my family”.

“Head still attached?”

“If you would be so kind, although if she does behead me you have my permission to strap me to a horse and dress me in black with a red cloak”.

“Duly noted”.

A smile made its way onto my face and he winked at me. I knew this old banter and I realized I had missed this too, our playful conversations, the side no one else was privy to. They were better than when he hit me or cut me which he had also done in the past, at any rate. That was the moment I noted this had been the longer conversation I´d had that had not been about my injuries or my mental health. I liked that he treated me the same way he had back then. Everyone else had treated me with kid gloves, from the doctors and nurses to the shrinks and physical therapists and especially my family, like I was going to break at any given moment. I also relished the small details I remembered about him like his despise for cucumber. 

“You should sleep, it´s going to be a long flight”, he told me.

“Are you really expecting me to let my guard down in a plane full of murderers? For all I know Hannibal Lecter is piloting the craft!”

“He was too expensive, we couldn´t get him”. Wise-ass. “You managed to sleep in close quarters with me, I´m sure you can handle a bunch of low-lives. Do you still have your knife on you?”

“Have a little faith”, I scoffed.

“That´s my girl”, he said that aloud and got up to talk to his men but not before placing a soft kiss on the top of my head effectively claiming me as his and thus, making sure none of the henchmen would dare trespass against me.

“Woman”, I muttered. “I´m twenty-one”.

Damn him and his subtle manipulation even if this time it was for my own benefit. I sighed and brought my knees to my chest in an attempt to keep myself warm.  
In the end I must´ve dozed off because it was Doc, hand on my shoulder who woke me up. I smiled when I saw him and surprised myself because it hadn´t been forced. May sniffed him as he sat on the seat the Joker had previously occupied.

“Service dog?” he asked me, eyeing May´s vest.

“It helped after… you know”.

“I´m sorry I wasn´t there for you, kid. What you have gone through I wouldn´t wish it on my worst enemy”.

“Yeah, living with my mom was pretty awful”, he chuckled. “It´s alright Doc, I don´t blame you”. I hadn´t said a single lie since the Joker had made an appearance in my life, that had only happened once before and it had been six years ago and I felt how freeing it was to not have to keep track of all the lies I told.

“For a second there you two seemed to be getting along just like the old times”, he commented nonchalantly but I saw his eyes were bright.

“When I woke up on the boat I thought he was going to kill me but he´s still the same as always… it´s nice to remember who I used to be too”.

“He does have a way of making you feel alive”.

“How has he been? Last I knew, he was in Arkham”.

“He escaped three months ago with the help of Harley, his psychiatrist”.

“She broke him out? Mine only sputtered nonsense”.

“Him and a bunch of the most dangerous criminals there, she´s quite obsessed with him and now she´s staying with us but they do not share a room”, he had a devilish smile now on his face. “They do sleep together if you know what I mean but he never spends the night with her much to her dismay. Frost is training her now, that´s why he couldn´t come, he sends his regards”.

“I missed him too”, I was still processing the implications of this Harley chick not sleeping in the same bed as the clown, the amused look on Doc´s face wasn´t helping matters.  
“Why did he spend six years there when you and I both know he could´ve broken out much sooner?” I whispered.

“Only he knows that or maybe not even him. The truth of the matter is you made an impression on both Frost and me but you also marked the boss. He thought he´d killed you, when Batman found him he was cradling your body”, I swallowed, taken aback. “From what Frost has been able to get from the doctor, she was the one who told him you were alive when he was morose on the sixth anniversary of your kidnapping”.

“You have an overactive imagination, Doc”, I tried to brush it off.

“And you don´t want to admit the truth. Those guys back there aren´t going to be able to look you in the eye after that kiss. The only female they´ve seen him interact with is Harley and half the time she´s covered in bruises and then you appear out of the blue after going to another continent to retrieve you and he kissed your forehead. I assure you, that´s a hell of a way to send a message”.

“We don´t work that way”, I said pointing to my temple. “Either way, I´m not the one he´s sleeping with”. Had that sounded like a complaint?

“Nor does he kiss Harley, ever, or arrange for a bunch of clothes her size to be hand-made and delivered to his room”.

“You´re not helping Doc”, I laughed and he did too.


	8. Your clothes. My pancakes

The first morning at the Joker´s state, I´d woken up on the floor completely alone, the asshole hadn´t even bothered to lay a blanket on top of me even though it was almost winter and there was a high chance he´d heard my teeth chatter at night. I put on one of his suit jackets and some pants that were too big on me but I was not about to traipse around in his underwear in a house full of men while looking for a way to escape. I pocketed the blade I had stolen the night before and opened the door which turned out not to be locked but only because there was a man standing right outside leaning against the wall. He had eyes the color of ice and white blond hair that was similar to mine, he was wearing all black and looked me up and down.

“You´ve got some nerve there, princess”, that nickname would stick.

I huffed, and then went down the stairs to find an enormous living room with a TV and some couches where some of the henchmen were watching cartoons. They all turned to look at me as we walked past them, Frost laughed at my back.

“Where´s the kitchen?” I asked, my stomach rumbling.

He led me to a poorly stocked kitchen where the only food available was eggs, tons of fizzy drinks, greasy boxes of already eaten pizzas stacked on the sink and some syrup.

“You guys need to step up your game”, I commented, getting out a frying pan and some eggs as well as baking powder I was able to find in a cabinet next to two dead cockroaches and a white powder I suspected wasn´t sugar.

“This is not a five star hotel, princess”.

“Clearly”, I retorted and out of the corner of my eye I caught his smirk. 

Resigning myself to an unhealthy breakfast, I started making the dough for the pancakes and then putting it on the pan with some butter. The smell seemed to attract all the men in the vicinity as they all came crawling to me with delighted expressions on their faces. That changed as soon as they realized I wasn´t making enough for them all, only for me.

“What do you think you´re doing wench?” barked one of them.

“My breakfast”, I stressed the first word. “If you want some, make them yourself”.

“That´s not how things work. You´re the woman”, what a delightfully educated bunch of men.

“That doesn´t make me your cook”, I replied. “It only makes me smarter and better looking”.

Some of them seemed about to object to my statement in what I suspected, would not be in a civilized manner, when their boss pranced into the kitchen and after analyzing the whole scene, walked up to me and took my plate from my hands.

“That´s mine”, I stated, throwing daggers at him.

“Not anymore. Since you are taking my clothes, I figured I could take your food”, he said, drenching my perfectly cooked pancakes in maple syrup, so much it was actually obscene.

“I don´t have any clothes here”, I crossed my arms.

“You could always walk around naked, give the boys an anatomy lesson”.

“You´re disgusting”, I sneered. “All of you”.

“Oh, come now sweetheart. No big words before noon”, he chastised me, thoroughly enjoying my irritation. 

“Fuck you”, I spat and apparently that was a step too far as all the henchmen took a collective step back, including Frost. 

The Joker got up, making a big show of it, scraping his chair on the linoleum floor for dramatic effect. I gulped and got out my switchblade but he was quick to send it flying across the room and when I tried to hit him with the frying pan, he hit me so hard I tumbled over and fell after an open-handed slap that bruised my cheek and stung like crazy, making my eyes water. But still I got up and charged him with everything I had which turned out not to be much because he used my strength against me and threw me against the table, knocking the air from my lungs which forced me to gasp for air and that´s when he got his hands around my neck and squeezed hard while I thrashed, trying to kick him or gouge his eyes out with my nails, whichever I could manage first. He didn´t stop until all my movements ceased, my vision reduced to black dots swimming around blurry silhouettes. I didn´t even have enough strength to scratch at his hands.

“You learn to behave yourself little one or sexist remarks will be the least of your worries. Understood?” He didn´t release me but he let me some space so I could nod which I didn´t, I wasn´t going to bow down to him and especially not in front of his men. At moments like this, not caring about your well-being really came in handy so I just stared at him defiantly with tears streaming down my face.

He was a strong alpha, he wasn´t going to tolerate disrespect but dragging this on any longer, seeing as I wasn´t going to agree to his threat, could be seen as him losing some of his power too so he just gave me another long and hard squeeze. When he finally let me come down from the table, my legs were wobbly but I refused to take the arm Frost offered and walked pathetically to my room thanking God for photographic memory because asking for directions would have been humiliating. When I finally arrived, I closed the door forcefully and got under the scorching spray of the shower, relishing the pain.


	9. Rainbow dresses and Hannibal Lecter

I wasn´t exactly scared but I was apprehensive and it must have been obvious to May because she stuck to my side and looked up at me as I walked like a lamb to the slaughterhouse only it was the Joker´s new hideout. 

“At this point I´m only hoping it won´t be too painful”, I told her.

Nevertheless, I kept on walking as I shouted obscenities at my family in my mind for not letting me undergo any training for six years. I couldn´t trust the Joker to look out for me, I only had myself and I couldn´t expect anyone to get me out of the situation. I was so screwed.

“Puddin´!” a high-pitched voice screeched as soon as the easily recognizable mop of green hair made its appearance inside the abandoned factory.

A woman with white hair in pigtails with red and blue tips on each side of her head, came running down a creaky staircase, clad in only a sports bra and skimpy shorts. Her makeup was smeared all over her face due to the sweat and there were nasty cuts o her arms, stomach and legs, she had been training.  
I assumed she was Harley when she laced her perfectly toned legs around the Joker´s waist and placed a kiss on his cheek, way too close to his lips to be accidental, I didn´t imagine that was how he received his henchmen now. I hid my smile behind a cough which drew her attention to me and crazy eyes zeroed in on me. 

Doc had been wrong, the clothes hadn´t been for me but for her, we seemed to be roughly the same size. The Joker was a second away from drawing out his gun and blasting me into oblivion so he could start his new life with Mrs. Crazy Clown. I made out Frost´s hair as he made his way to the first row of men as they had all gathered in a circle around us to see the spectacle, maybe hoping they would get drenched in my blood. 

“You haven´t killed her yet?” Harley asked her lover, cocking her head like a German shepherd puppy.

I took one last look at Doc and then at Frost who hadn´t changed one bit and placed myself in front of a very anxious May. There was no point in trying to fight my way out of the building, I didn´t have the weapons nor the stamina so facing my death with dignity was preferable. I looked meaningfully at the Joker to remind him wordlessly of the promise he´d made to me on the plane regarding my dog and then accepted my fate. I closed my eyes only to open them a second later when the Joker´s scent assaulted my nose.

“No bullet to the head then, just plain old choking. Traditional”, I said so low only he could hear it and I was proud of the fact that my voice wasn´t shaky in the slightest, I didn’t even feel fear, I was just rambling. “More personal. Fitting as we do have a history together. This time make sure you get the deal done, I don´t want to wake up in the hospital again with all my bones broken. I swear to you, if I have to go through another physical therapy lesson I´ll kill you myself. Just remember to find May a home”.

He smiled to himself and caressed my cheek before placing his left hand around my neck and then proceeded to do the same with his right hand.

“If it´s okay with you, I´d prefer to uphold the first promise I made to you. Do you remember what it was?”

I wracked my brain trying to go back to that eventful night that would turn my whole existence upside down and send me down a path of pain and excitement.

“That you wouldn´t kill me without telling me first”, I said, proud I could remember. “Then say it and get on with it already. This time please make it quick”. So much for pride.

“Sometimes I still wonder why I kept you around”, he was looking right into my eyes, his impressive height towering over me and I reckoned we were having an intimate moment in front of at least fifty strangers.

“And why was it?” I asked.

“You´re at your funniest when under duress”.

“Make sure they write that in my tombstone. Nothing about that ´beloved sister and daughter´ crap, it´s too ordinary. And make sure they return my hair to its normal color, I hate black hair. And don´t let them bury me in a grandma´s ensemble, I want to wear a dress with all the colors of the rainbow that has glitter all over it. Go out with a bang you  
know”. Some may argue I was bluffing, buying time but when you spend so long planning your own death, you make sure to polish the details of your funeral as well.

“Anything else now that you´re at it?” he almost laughed.

“Black lipstick, it´s still a serious affair, a funeral. Wouldn´t want to get anyone´s panties in a twist, keep it conservative. Oh, and they have to be playing scenes from The silence of the lambs as they bury me, I don´t want a priest, you know I´m an atheist. Just Hannibal Lecter”.

“Sure thing, little one”, he mocked me and I pursed my lips, you shouldn´t joke around when you´re about to kill a long acquaintance. I myself had been planning to enjoy a nice glass of champagne after having killed my brother. “Any last words?”

“I feel like I already asked for too many things”, I reasoned.

“More unremarkable words have never left your lips”.

“Well, I´m sorry I don´t conform to your high standards. Do you want me to haunt you from the afterlife?”

“I much prefer you alive and being adorably naïve than dead and buried, rainbow dress or not”. I took offense at the word ´adorable´.

That was also the moment I realized his hands were no longer around my neck and that he´d leaned down so we could be at the same height level and we´d been whispering to each other for quite some time.

“You´re not going to kill me?” 

“I may still threaten to do it every once in a while though”, now he was positively making fun of me.

I punched his arm half-heartedly and he let me but when I went for it again, he caught my fist in his hand effortlessly and spun me around until I was facing Frost and then pushed me in his direction.

“Take her to her room”, he ordered him.

Frost nodded and then put his arm around my shoulders to steer me towards the stairs Harley had come down a while ago. I could feel him trembling next to me and I gathered he was laughing, a quick look confirmed my suspicions.

“Not you too, Doc already gave me the talk. I swear I thought he was going to kill me, that was no shameless flirting you just saw”.

“I know Princess, I´m just so glad you´re okay. He is too, by the way”, he added conspiratorially.

“I swear you two will be the death of me”.

“Will you give us the speech you gave the boss as well?”

“You heard it?”

“No way, it was far too low. You were practically breathing the same air, Harley was seeing red. You may have to brush up on your fighting skills”.

“Great”, I could only hope Harley had not made great progress in her training so far.

“Jokes aside, I really am very happy you´re back with us”. We had reached one of the few rooms in the abandoned factory that smelled of dust and mold. “I´d be happy to help you get back in shape, it will be nice after Harley”.

“Who´ll train her then?”

“The Joker. I think he plans to keep her as busy and weak as possible so she won´t be able to focus on you”.

“He´s not that nice. Anyway, with my limp and useless hand I´ll be dead in no time”.

“We´ll work on that, don´t fret and either way, I´m sure the Joker will be thrilled to fight against you if you ask him, that way the two of you will be on even ground but for the time being do not try to be in a room alone with her”.

“That´s very reassuring”, I scoffed. “I´ve missed your real talk”.

He ruffled my hair tenderly and opened the door for me. This new room had almost the same furniture as the others I´d seen that belonged to the clown except the windows were coated in grime, rust and dust and there wasn´t a bed, only a naked mattress on the floor with paint covered sheets and pillows. He still had his grease paint, blueprints and bomb sketches, he was after all a great artist too but I was shocked to find my old drawings there too among his documents. Sketches I´d made of him out of sheer boredom and with incredible detail, no matter that the subject was always moving around, never still but I´d memorized his bone structure and facial expressions.

Frost must have recovered them from the old hideout and given them to him, looking them I felt a pang of melancholy because I´d never be able to draw like that again, not with two fingers that had no feeling in them, I couldn´t even hold a pencil properly and every time I´d tried to draw with my left hand it had turned out a horrible mess because I´d brush my hand over what I´d just drawn and smudge the whole thing.

The bathroom was more Spartan than anything else and only contained the essentials which apparently also included a cracked mirror and tons of hair dye. A small smile made its way onto my face when I saw all the hair products and felt a small tremble welcoming me home. I cleared some space beneath the window and looked at the Narrows through the grime.

“We´re back in Gotham, May”, I told the pup who was by my feet. “Back home”.

≈

“We should have done more! Send more backup! Anything”, mother shouted desperate and heartbroken while father tried to console her.

“How did they even find us in the first place?” I asked, nursing my injury and feeling helpless, I´d failed her again.

“That psychiatrist, Dr. Quinzel pulled out the therapy dog records and was able to trace May all the way to you”, explained father.

“Damn her and damn him as well! Who knows what he´ll do to her now”.

“This is all my fault”, I lowered my head, the weight of guilt crushing me.

“No, it´s not”, father denied. “This is on that psychopath and his doctor. We have to trust Elsa will be alright, we raised a strong daughter and she´ll come back to us like she did last time”. It wasn´t clear whether he was trying to convince himself or us.

“Last time she almost died and after that she was never the same. You can deny it all you want but the last person that saw our real Elsa was that clown, we only got a washed out version”.

Mother had been making comments like that ever since I appeared at their footstep, apparently her old fears were catching up with her after three months of intense worrying and father had told me she was having nightmares again. 

“That girl went through the unimaginable and you blame her for not being the same after that?” Apparently mi father had had it too.

“I´m just saying something broke inside her, made her a bit like him. We all know it, how she would look around the house trying to find someone or how she would have conversations with herself all the time but only when she thought we wouldn´t hear her or how she refused to take the rape kit test”.

“That was because she felt humiliated enough, the Joker has never raped any of his hostages and she told me herself that he told her he wouldn´t hurt her in that way”, I defended my sister, “I get that you´re upset but that´s no reason to insinuate there was something between them. She was kidnapped because she tried to protect you, for God´s sake!”

“Your father also thinks they had some kind of connection”, she answered spitefully.

“I think we all better stop pointing fingers at each other and try to find a way of rescuing Elsa instead of tearing each other apart”, father intervened and mother and I shared a look but ended up nodding at the same time.


	10. Pillow forts in the endless gray

I was nineteen when I made the decision to stop taking my meds, ironically enough, my family still know nothing of this two years later. We were in Italy, during one of the hottest summers I could remember, the doctors had cleared me for a couple of weeks so I could celebrate my birthday with my father´s mother and her husband who wasn´t my actual grandpa in her impressive villa in Tuscany. Back in Gotham, my future therapy dog was undergoing training to help me in the future.

Up until then I´d been on antidepressants, narcoleptics and tons of other anxiety-related medication which left me apathetic, my body devoid of energy, my thoughts painfully sluggish. This meant I had turned into a pathetic, submissive creature. Occasionally they would still drag me to the hospital so they could pump me with more drugs that left me bedridden for days at a time.

My body felt heavy all the time and menial tasks took forever to complete and in spite of that, I´d managed to finish my education and college was on the horizon for me and that proved to be another cause for concern for my parents and Rudy because they wouldn´t be able to monitor me 24/7, especially if I resided in a dorm. So they had solved the problem by only applying for local universities. I was too far gone in my drug haze to even care.

I suspected I was going crazy but I didn´t have the energy to care about that, what was clear was the fact that I could no longer trust my mind, the previous four years had taught me that along with the countless therapy sessions. What I thought I´d lived was all a creation of my imagination, a defense mechanism, the doctors had said. I´d created a benign narrative in my mind to block out the trauma the shrinks seemed so intent on finding. That´s how they´d come to the conclusion that the only reason I wasn´t in a mental hospital was I´d made up different versions of what had really happened in my head and then convinced myself they were real.

At first, after returning from the hospital, I was confident in my story, of what had happened. I also knew I couldn´t tell anyone or they might ask too many questions so I studied the symptoms of PTSD and started replicating them. The night terrors had been real but not so the anxiety and the panic attacks, at least until I came to the realization that my mind was a professional liar just like I was and then everything had come crumbling down.

I´d lost control of my body for months due to how broken it had been but my mind had always been my refuge, a steady and constant thing I could go back to when I was feeling overwhelmed about the storm that my life had become. And then they´d taken that away from me too and so the anxiety and attacks had become real.  
Self-harming was a foregone conclusion according to the shrinks, they said it was common for trauma victims to want to take control of the pain they were experiencing by inflicting it themselves. They weren´t surprised either with my suicide attempts and I remember feeling unoriginal.

My mother had, of course, been inconsolable by then, crying about how I´d never be able to find a proper husband with all the cuts in my arms and all the news coverage on my attempts. I didn´t even have the energy to kill her.

What I ached for were the voices inside my head. Normally it was the Joker that spoke to me, sometimes Frost or Doc but the meds had drowned them out in a sea of gray. They had not been a constant since the hospital, I hadn´t listened to them all the time, just on marked occasions making incisive comments about my family or those around me. And although I had found that comforting, probably the only thing to help get me through the day, those voices had belonged to the version of those people I had in my memories. Maybe Doc wasn´t even real and he was just a figment of my traumatized mind, maybe Frost had hated my guts.

My birthday celebration was pompous and over-the-top, it couldn´t be any other way with my mother. She´d made us dress in posh, elegant clothes and then had a breakdown when that had reminded her of the night the Joker had thrown my wedding prospects out the window. Turns out not a lot of bachelors swing for previously kidnapped women, especially if the perpetrator is the Clown Prince of Crime who was still very much alive. They all avoided me like the plague and I felt thankful for that.

We´d eaten cake outside looking at the night sky with my grandmother and her husband and all our bodyguards. My granny, although now in a wheelchair, was still the head of the Rinaldi mafia and I recalled feeling proud of it when I was a child. Little escaped her small, beady eyes and so my present situation hadn´t gone unnoticed.

“I´m confident we´ll be able to procure a fitting match for her”, my mother was telling her once dinner was over and the men were trying to get the CD player to work so we could dance. “She´s not been on the papers for some time now, people will forget about it and the Rinaldi fortune will attract suitors in spite of Elsa being tainted”. Motherly love at its finest. “She´ll find a decent man, I´ll make sure of it, she can´t be a spinster all her life”. Nineteen, I was nineteen, not eighty. “I hope her kids inherit her beauty”, she sighed wistfully. “I´m looking forward to becoming a grandmother”. Don´t hold your breath.

Finally, the tango started playing and dad asked mom to dance while Rudy did the same with me. She agreed while I declined, saying I wanted to keep grandma company and so I sat next to her, burrowed in my shawl.

“Such a dull woman”, was her greeting and I couldn´t help but snicker at her comment. “Always parroting about your wedding incessantly, if your father didn´t love her so, I would´ve killed her a long time ago”. It was no wonder she was the only family member I liked.

We stayed quiet for a while as Rudy now dipped mum while dad talked to his mother´s latest husband.

“What is wrong with you?” her tone was acerbic, stern. There might have been a touch of concern somewhere in her voice but it was hard to know for sure when she didn´t put on her mask. “You walk again, you can even run, you no longer have casts or any physical handicaps save your limp and your hand and yet your mind is what is hurting now. Tell me why”.

“I think I´m losing my grip on reality”, talking with her felt reminiscent of talking to the Joker and there was comfort in that with the difference that I was marginally sure she wouldn´t stab me in the back, literally speaking. Only marginally, though. “The meds aren´t helping either, everything has slowed down”, I touched my temple as I said that. It felt nice to not have to pretend to care about things when I was with her, or to overthinks about if what I was saying was too callous because she wouldn´t be offended or taken aback.

Her eyes watched me like a vulture, sunk in her wrinkly and aged face. At her age she was a very classy woman, still with her gray mane combed to perfection and her stylish midnight blue dress, she didn´t look frail and tired like I did.

“Stop taking them. Rinaldi women are proud and powerful and in control, we do not cower or bow down. We make our own path and kill whoever opposes us, our husbands too if needed”, she exhibited a predatory smile and I chanced a look at the chain around her neck where three rings were dangling from belonging to her previous marriages. “We take what we want and we erect empires. We are cunning and deceitful, sweet and loving when need be but above all we are warriors. If you aren´t ready to uphold that tradition of proud women that came before you, I picked poisonous berries this morning and put them in your room. I don´t want a weak granddaughter but a fierce amazon”.

“Is that why you didn´t let mom change her maiden name? That´s why she´s not a Rinaldi?” I was not even ofended that she had basically told me to off myself if I didn´t feel strong enough to uphold the family´s values.

“Your mother is not worthy of our name, child. She´s clueless as well, she doesn´t know you´ve already found a man”.

She had barely spoken a word in all the time we´d been in the villa and she was making up for it now with her clever observations. She didn´t ask me whether I loved him or if he loved me back, she knew my answer already because it was her own as well as the rings hanging around her neck proved. She had strategically picked men to enlarge her fortune and continue her empire of crime and when she got bored of them, she killed them because divorce papers were too tiresome, as she had explained to me in the past. I knew she had had many lovers and I suspected some had been like us when she was younger and was able to take them on but not now when she was in a wheelchair even though she could still walk, now she had settled with a normal man, a fairly intelligent one from what I´d seen but never a match for her own intelligence.

“He´s not like Fred, right?” Fred was her husband, her neurotypical husband.

“God, no”.

“Good, he´s like you then. Where is he?”

“In an asylum”.

“Like the man who kidnapped you”.

“Exactly like him”.

“I see”, she allowed herself a small smile as she looked at me and then squeezed my hand once. “Can you handle him?”

“Part of why it is so fun is the fact that I can´t predict him, much less control him. The same goes for him regarding me. We are both trump cards”.

“You are playing with fire”, she was smiling as she said this, not an ounce of worry in her gaze.

“He is too”, I got up then, feeling rather tired after our conversation and as I leaned to kiss her goodnight, I whispered. “So when is Fred´s funeral?”

She accepted her kiss regally and then winked at me. As I reached the kitchen where my pill bottles were, I changed them for aspirins I found in the bathroom and then threw the real medicine down the drain. Today was the day I took my life back.

It took me until the end of or stay in Italy until the meds fully left my organism and my head felt clearer, I could focus better and I didn´t feel as drained. On my last night there I built a pillow fort just because, I had never done that when I was small and I wanted to see if my construction would hold, plus I couldn´t sleep so I got to work diligently.  
When it was all set up, I climbed over the pillows only for them to crumble over me as well as the sheets I´d used to make it look fancier and as I lay there smothered by all the pillows, I heard his voice for the first time in months of endless gray.

“Well, that was a stupid idea”.

His actual voice took me back to the present, yanking me out of my memory.

“Are we building a pillow fort?” he asked, entering the room where I was kneeling on the bed creating a barrier of pillows that would divide the bed in two parts.

“No, this is for my nightmares. I have a tendency to kick when I´m in the middle of one and I´d like to avoid waking up with a knife to my throat because I accidentally punched you in my sleep”, I explained as May observed the Joker from her position at my feet.

“I want to make a pillow fort”, he decided, “we are making a pillow fort”.

“No, we´re not”, I huffed crossing my arms.

Twenty minutes later, I was laying under a blanket that was the roof of our fort, May snuggled comfortably against my side and the Joker fixing one of the walls in our fort so it wouldn´t fall. When he finished, he laid back down next to me and he remained in that position for exactly fifteen seconds until he sighed in annoyance and I rolled my eyes.

“Why do people make pillow forts? It´s stupid”.


	11. Of kittens with claws and pasta in glasses

I stayed in the bathroom until my rumbling stomach couldn´t take it anymore and started contracting painfully. After listening for any human activity in the bedroom and deciding there was none, I decided to go downstairs again. On the way out, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and cringed. My neck was a purple and green mess and my cheek was swollen and bright red, one of my eyes had trouble opening due to the swelling and the other cheek sported the cut he´d given me the evening before. 

When I opened the door that led to a hallway and then to the stairs to the ground floor, I came face to face with three of the Joker´s minions. I was about to walk past them when one of them stopped me.

“The boss made us get some groceries”, he informed me.

“I´m still not cooking for you. If you want food that isn´t take out I´m willing to teach you how to cook but I´m not doing it for you or cleaning after you or doing the dishes”, I wanted that to be clear.

After nervously checking out my injuries, they agreed and I wondered if their boss had ordered them to be nice to me as well, I didn´t know him very well but that seemed out of character. Maybe they were afraid of me, after all I had refused to cower before their boss, perhaps I´d gained their respect.  
The four of us went downstairs and went to the kitchen where I examined the ingredients they´d bought and decided to go with an easy and quick pasta recipe as I was to hungry and the guys too inexperienced to attempt anything more elaborate.

“First we have to boil water to cook the pasta”, I started, “and add some salt to the water as well when it is the right temperature and you have the spaghetti cooking inside the pot”.

The henchmen scrambled to follow my instructions while I got started on the tomato sauce and ordered one of them to chop some sausages and cook them apart from the pasta. As the smell of homemade cooking spread throughout the lair more men appeared just like that morning but none of them dared to be rude to me and I guessed it was because I´d stood up to the Joker and was still breathing. That must´ve meant something to them and if things did get out of hand, I´d hidden one of the kitchen knives in the waistband of my pants.

I put some of them to work stocking the cabinets with the newly acquired food and even had one of them taste the tomato sauce, I knew how to play nice too, I´d been doing it my whole life. I could wrap them around my little finger and maybe one of them would help me escape or just make my stay more pleasant. But I couldn´t rely on them, I was out for myself, I would have to come up with a plan, pronto. 

When all the food was ready, I mixed it all together in the pot only to realize they didn´t have plates there, only glasses and still then, not so many so I had to make do with what little I had and the goons had to take turns eating out of glasses with their fingers or the three forks they found. When I asked one of them why they had so little cutlery, he explained they moved often as the Joker was a wanted criminal and so they couldn´t afford the luxury of plates or much really because moving in the middle of the night was a very real possibility. I wondered whether I could slip out unnoticed during one such occasion.

“The meeting´s over”, one of the men suddenly announced and they all scattered leaving me bewildered and in a dirty kitchen with tomato stains on the counters and even half eaten glasses of food. 

That´s how the Joker and Frost found me when they entered the mansion and unconsciously I lifted a hand as if to protect my neck from further assault, a very real possibility now that his men had left such a mess behind. His eyes scanned the room and then he moved towards me. 

“I see you were having a dinner party while Frost and I were away”, he drawled out stepping into my personal space and touching the tender skin of my neck, I had to bit my lips not to let out a whimper. His laugh rumbled in his chest. “Have you eaten, little one?” Would he ever stop making fun of my small size?

I went to nod but stopped short when I realized I´d been so busy overseeing the eating arrangements to remember my own needs so I shook my head.

“Sit down then”, he signaled the counter with his chin and I hoisted myself up.

He handed me a glass with spaghetti and a fork but I didn´t dig into it until he and Frost sat as well and I could breathe properly again. I was not used to feeling this kind of trepidation in my stomach and my body found it disturbing and intriguing at the same time that he could cause it just by being in the same room as me. They ate in silence and I wondered when would be a good time to retreat to the relative safety of the bedroom, there were too many sharp objects in the kitchen. Too many possibilities of getting stabbed.

“Your father is calling in a lot of favors from the other mafia bosses to find you”, he informed me like one would comment on the weather. “That could be a problem for you, I have a lot of projects in motion and having him breathing down my neck may prove to be distracting so I just may kill you to get rid of him”.

“If you do that he´ll hunt you down”, not that he´d care.

“Then I´ll have to kill him as well”.

“Or you could just take me back”, he cackled at that.

“With you here I have leverage over the most powerful mob in Gotham and that means I´m entitled to half their profits every month if daddy doesn´t want to find his pretty daughter in a ditch”.

“You´re too lazy to procure the money yourself so you have to resort to blackmail. What a criminal!” I mocked, aware of the fact that I was crossing a line, I didn´t much care.

“Careful sweetheart, I don´t know if you´re ready for round three yet”.

“I´d say someone is insecure about something if every time someone hurts your ego, you threaten them with violence”.

He knew what I was doing, he was too intelligent not to see through my manipulation. I wanted to see if he´d react, take the bait and hit me again, I was testing his limits.

“Seems like someone´s got a death wish”, he whispered appearing out of the blue between my legs, he´d moved so fast I got whiplash. He had a knife to my throat too, he made a small cut.

“Don´t you?” I asked back, putting the kitchen knife I´d swiped earlier against his stomach.

“The kitty has claws, I like that”.

He still smashed my head against the counter enough times to knock me out.


	12. Black strong coffee, no sugar

I wasn´t able to see what Mr. Jay saw in that helpless wench. He wouldn´t follow her around with puppy eyes begging for her attention, that glaring display of weakness and submission was reserved for lesser men than him. But he would do subtler things like follow her comings and goings out of the corner of his eye whenever they were in the same room and the henchmen would avoid her instead of bullying her like they´d done with me. That alone spoke for itself.

Even Frost was helping her and the quiet man seemed to like her much more than he did me. As of late, he would lose his patience with me quicker and would often be more aggressive and hurt and exhaust me more than usual and my Puddin´ had taken to doing pretty much the same thing so that left me tired and cranky and sore on a daily basis.  
The last fight we´d had had ended with a concussion and nasty cuts and bruises for me and ruffled hair for him. He also had less time for me and when he was with me he was impatient to get me out of his sight. On the flip side, our amorous activities had undergone a small change as well. He´d always been a selfish lover and I had never cared but lately he almost seemed crazed with all that was going on and would slam into me forcefully again and again bruising my thighs and leaving me extremely sore. He´d even bit and cut me in the middle of the act a couple of times since Elsa had arrived.

To me, with my psychiatric training, it seemed obvious he was sublimating his more aggressive tendencies and shallow, suppressed feelings and taking it out on me and I was willing to ignore this but it hurt to know that it was the other woman in the lair he was doing this for, to adapt to her gentler nature. But what really bugged me was that he never kissed me on the lips, never a tender gesture in front of his men and even though he treated Elsa much the same way he did me in public, as far as displays of affection went, I knew he wasn´t indifferent towards her.

I didn´t know what went on behind doors because I was smart enough to know that while I was the one who opened her legs to him, she was the one he spent the night with. I didn´t know if he kissed her when they were laying side by side in the darkness or even if they slept or made love.

What she did do in the dead of night was shout. The first time it had happened had been the third night after her arrival. The Joker had been deep inside me and I´d been begging him to spend the night with me but after her first scream pierced the silence of the night already disturbed by my moans and wanton cries, he´d pulled out of me immediately, put on his pants in a rush and ran towards the stairs. 

I´d followed after him, motivated by morbid curiosity rather than genuine worry, wrapped in a bed sheet. Some of the men had got out of their cots as well, alarmed and startled but Frost had shouted at them from the upper level to mind their own business so they went back to sleep, mumbling their disconformity.

When I climbed the stairs, I was able to catch a glimpse of the Joker kneeling on the floor next to a feminine figure whose body was wracked by tremors and shivers, the dog was nowhere in sight from my perspective but it was the Joker´s second in command that slammed the door before I could get a better grasp of the situation.

“If she´s having nightmares I could help her”, I protested, trying to get past him but he wouldn´t let me, placing himself between the door an me every time I tried to get through.

“You can go back to your room now, Harley”, his eyes never wandered down my body even though I wasn´t wearing any clothes.

“But I can help! I´m a psychiatrist!” The truth of the matter was that I didn´t care about her, I only wanted to be close to him. And Frost knew that.

“And how did that work out for you?” he mocked me condescendingly and I snarled at him.

“Go away”, he said tiredly and because I knew fighting in just a bed sheet wasn´t a great idea, I did, cursing his name as I went down the stairs.

“What´s going on Harley?” asked one of the henchmen after checking me out.

“The Joker´s charity project”, that was my favorite nickname for that despicable, attention-starved elf and it had stuck with the men, “she´s having a nightmare”.

“It sounded like someone was killing her”, he let out a low whistle.

“No such luck”.

This behavior turned out not to be a one-time thing. More often than not, she´d wake up in this fashion and after a while the Joker stopped going to her every time and instead would pound harder into me so that my own screams would eclipse hers and I felt powerful and needed when he would reward me with a bite on my breasts. 

The dog would instead be the one in charge of waking her up and calm her down, ground her. It had been thanks to the therapy dog that we´d been able to track her down in the first place as very few people traveled with them, fake names be damned so it was only fair that it be the one to bear the burden its owner was to us all.

The henchmen were getting irritated due to the lack of sleep and as the first month went by with her in our ranks the hate against her became widespread, by the second month they were positively seething and gave her dirty looks when she passed them in the hallways. Some even tried to sneak something into her drink, they mysteriously died in their next assignment.

I knew the Joker was getting restless too, groaning out loud every time she had an episode and even went as far as to shoot two of his men out of pure anger. The coffee consumption in the factory went through the roof as well as the drug use to help keep the men awake during the jobs they headed out on, almost always accompanied by the Joker. I suspected he just wanted to get away from Elsa to get rid of some of his aggressiveness, burn off some steam.

“Harley, the boss wants you to bring him some coffee”, informed me one of the goons coming into the kitchen where I was, coincidentally at the same time Elsa was there too. 

She´d just walked in, sporting dark bags under her eyes, her hair looking like a bird´s nest, all in all she looked sick and frazzled.  
I was quick to grab the only mug we had and filled it with scalding coffee and poured plenty of sugar in it.

“He likes his coffee black and strong, no sugar”, Elsa suddenly said, the first words she´d spoken to me and I almost threw the mug at her.

“Do you really think I´m stupid enough to fall for the oldest trick in the book?” I talked back to her, did she really think I was that stupid?

“I´m only trying to spare you, he´s in a really bad mood right now and if you bring him that coffee, it´ll set him off and he´ll take it out on you, that´s all”.

I scoffed at her warning and went up the stairs to his room where he was working hunched over a table, scribbling furiously on his papers that were written in code so only he could understand them. I wanted to take a peek at the room as it was the first time I was there but I didn´t want him to catch me snooping around so I stopped my wandering eyes.

“What took you so long?” he complained, taking the mug from my hands as soon as I was close enough.

He took a large gulp and then proceeded to spit it in my face, burning me and I screamed in shock and agony but I was quick enough to dodge the mug he then threw at my head. Turns out the girl hadn´t been lying after all. As soon as that thought crossed my mind, I cowered when he got up, his hand ready to strike me and just then, Elsa burst through the door with a glass brimming with coffee in her hands.

“Here, have this”, she told him while he glared intensely at her and she puffed her chest.

“I know you´re mad at me but I do know how you like your coffee so take it from me before I burn my hands”.

I could never talk to him like that and not get beaten immediately after but to my surprise, he complied, still shooting daggers at her and then sat back down. The two of us turned around to make our leave but the Joker spoke before we left the room.

“Elsa, you stay”.

I knew right then and there I´d been replaced with a damaged and imperfect woman and I couldn´t help the bitterness I felt at that fact. What did that wench have that I lacked? Nightmares? It was true the two shared a past but even then, it had only been five months at the end of which he´d nearly killed her. Was it guilt then, motivating his actions? I shook my head, he was not capable of feeling that. What was it then?  
Taking a page out of my lover´s book, I´d thrown myself into Frost´s training, six and sometimes seven hours a day, it had certainly helped that I´d been a gymnast when I was younger as my body still possessed that extra flexibility and stamina my tutor loved to push to the limit. In that way at least I could get that dwarf out of my head for a few hours. 

I´d caught glimpses of Elsa´s and Frost´s fights as well, she was definitely versed in combat but it was clear she´d gone a long time without partaking in it as she relied more heavily on her intellectual capabilities. Having said that, she was a formidable rival even if her movements were a little rusty or stiff due to her injuries.  
The truth is if I weren´t competing against her for the Joker´s affections, then maybe I would acknowledge that she was a remarkable young woman who had overcome so much but as it was, that blonde wench was going down.


	13. Frozen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: there is an implied rape attempt in this chapter which is described at the end. Read at your own discretion.

“You did it on purpose”, I stated when she bent down to pet the mutt that was lying on her side of the bed.

“I don´t know what you´re talking about”, she replied.

“I´m guessing you warned Harley I didn´t like my coffee with sugar knowing full well that´s what she would bring to me because she´d think you were lying to her to get my seal of approval”.

“I don´t think she´s capable of having that train of thought”, she commented sarcastically as I sipped the hot liquid.

“She may be unhinged and needy but she´s not stupid and neither are you. Not bad little one, not bad”, she turned just enough that I could see the cunning smile on her face and I cackled.

I found it interesting that she bothered to hide how devious and manipulative she was behind a sweet if closed off at times mask but I supposed she did want to make her living in a society and not at its margins. When I realized she was not your run-of-the-mill socialite at that party six years ago, I was ecstatic at the challenge she posed. Her smile and calm amid the chaos had given her away. 

I quickly became intrigued by her and wanted to see what made her tick and everyday she´d show me something different about herself, probably without noticing but I´d always been a keen observer. I had never bothered to learn things about other people, just enough to best then but never like what had happened with her.  
She was strong-spirited and stubborn to a fault and her smart mouth and sharp tongue had got her in trouble with me a couple of times, especially at the beginning of our partnership when she was taking my pulse, figuring out what comments would trigger me to avoid getting beaten.

She could be charming when the situation required it or she could turn off her magnetism when she tried to make herself invisible. She was curious and extremely intelligent and scheming and that certainly had helped to endear herself to me.  
I´d not realized how contented I´d grown with her around until I´d come across two of my men talking about how they were going to force open the door to my room while I was away on one of the jobs and force her. The bullets had been out of my gun before I´d even processed their intentions. I knew they would have got a similar treatment from her if they had dared to do what they had been speaking about but now I´d never know for sure. 

It hadn´t been the sexual nature of the crime that had made me put a bullet through their heads, I didn´t condone that kind of activities but I had never killed my men for them before either. The act had been an impulse and even now six years later, I couldn´t be bothered to find out why I had done it.  
It had been a long time since crime had felt so good and with her wits and sarcasm by my side I definitely enjoyed my afternoons better. She had a way of dominating the workforce that was hilarious, she didn´t let any of the men step over her just because she was smaller and a woman. She gained a reputation by herself and I reckoned my men had grown to respect her.

She certainly liked Doc and Frost best so the thing that had always struck me as weird was how different he treated them as opposed to how she treated me, her kidnapper with who she let her wildest side out. She liked to fight with me even though I never went easy on her and she was always covered in bruises and cuts. I came to the conclusion that it was because with me she didn´t have the need to put on her mask.

I found out she sketched me often when I came across her stash of drawings of myself, I had never been too fond of people looking at me too closely but I could not fault her too much for it when that was the result. There were drawings of my eyes, my silhouette against my men, my fighting stances and quite a few of me at my table although these were blotchy as she had done and redone them a couple of times.

“You´re never still”, she explained to me when she caught me with them. “So I´m never able to get your facial expression right. It can get quite annoying but I do love a challenge and there´s not much for me to do around here anyway”, she became uncharacteristically quiet for a few seconds. “I could always draw other things”.

“My nose is crooked”, I offered after a drawn out silence as I pointed at the elegant straight line that she´d drawn. “I´ve broken it more times than I can remember, you yourself broke it once, when we met”.

She rushed to correct her mistake, looking at me as she made small adjustments with her lips pursed and her frown in place, her standard expression when she was focused on something. I was startled when I realized I knew that about her, granted, it wasn´t much but I´d never spent enough time around people to notice the little things about them. My longest acquaintance was Frost and only because he had been intelligent enough not to get killed but this teenage girl had managed to insert herself into my life and I wasn´t so sure how I felt about it now.

She was obviously a good leverage over her father which meant half the profits his business made on each job went to my accounts and money was always good but I didn´t want her to become a liability for me. To my surprise, I actually liked having her around, not in a romantic way but in a way one regards with fondness a pair of jeans that you hold on to because you´ve grown attached to them even if they are bleached and they get on your nerves sometimes. 

What I didn´t like was that this meant she could become a problem to me and my operations as a whole so I lashed out.

“My family have never seen my drawings, my mother thinks they are unladylike because I used to get charcoal on the dresses she made me wear, and my father just thought they were a waste of time and that if I was to inherit the family business it would be beneath me. My brother doesn´t understand anything outside the realm of working out or sleeping around. I don´t know why I told you that, you probably don´t even care”.

“That´s right, I don´t care about your family drama or about the fact that you are a frustrated artist. I just came across this childish drawings, I wasn´t interested in your family history”.

Her cheeks became red in a mixture of anger and rage but it only lasted for a few seconds and I was delighted I had cut her deep using only my words, apparently she was sensitive about her drawings. She snatched them out of my hands and stacked them on the floor at the feet of my bed where she slept and then she walked out of the room saying something about a glass of water as I went to my drawers to get out my pajama. 

I laughed when she slammed the door on her way out, that would show her not to get too cozy with me I didn´t want her feeling safe, I wanted her on her toes when she was around me. I was the Joker, not her friend just like she wasn´t mine.

It wasn´t too long until I heard a scuffle on the floor below and then a big thud as something heavy fell to the floor and it wasn´t until I saw Frost darting out of his room that I remembered I´d just hired a new recruit, a rapist to be exact and my steps quickened as well.

When both of us arrived at the crime scene, Elsa was standing with a bloodied knife in her hand, her t-shirt had been torn at the collar and she was showing some décolletage. Her face had tiny droplets of blood and she was shaking which informed me something was wrong as she hadn´t even blinked when I had fought her in the future and here she was shaking.

At her feet was my newest henchman, facing down and with blood staining the floor around his torso, he wasn´t breathing. 

Elsa´s hair was now loose where before it had been up in a ponytail and it looked messy. She was staring at the body and Frost had to call the men off as they were gathering around us trying to see what had happened.

“Doc´s here, Elsa”, Frost said to her but she showed no outward signs of having heard him.

“Are you hurt?” asked Doc approaching her tentatively but they got the same answer as before and that´s when I decided to take matters into my own hands and doused her in the water she´d gone to retrieve, much to my men´s shock.

But I got the reaction I´d been looking for as she turned to look at me, wet and trembling and snarled at me before jumping to stab me. I´d been ready for her and was able to block her right wrist to then extract the knife from her fingers and after that I let her hit me to her heart´s content because that was the outlet she needed. 

All her pent up anger and fear at what had almost happened to her turned into aggressivity she directed at me. She wasn´t strong enough or focused enough to do any real damage with only her bare fists so when I decided she´d had enough, I caught both of her wrists and crossed her arms behind her back to then bring her to my chest so that she was facing Doc and Frost who stared dumbfounded at the recent developments.

“Now you can ask her questions”, I informed them as she struggled to free herself.

“Let me go!” she squirmed in my grip. “You´re hurting me”.

“Tough luck. Now, answer Doc”, I whispered in her ear.

“I´m okay, I got him before he could do anything to me. He only ripped my t-shirt, he didn´t touch me. Now let me go”, I only held her a few more seconds to show her she couldn´t order me around but then I let her go and she rubbed her wrists and glared at me so I winked in response. “Now if all three of you excuse me, I´m going to take a shower”, and off she went.

“She´s a spitfire”, I praised her. “I´m not even mad she killed one of my men”.

“She had a good reason”, Frost reminded me. “Should she sleep with me tonight, boss?” When my irate glare turned on him, he rushed out. “She´s shaken, for all we know that was her first kill and the guy tried to rape her. Maybe she´ll feel more comfortable with me”.

“I didn´t realize you two had become quite so close”, I mocked whishing I´d brought a gun.

“What Frost was trying to say is that maybe Elsa should spend the night with someone she feels comfortable with”, came Doc in his aid.

“And I don´t fit that description?” I feigned hurt.

The two men looked at each other, pondering how best to tell me that I was an insensitive bastard in a way that wouldn´t get them killed.

“Look, if I know something about her after three months is that she hates feeling weak, she´s probably under the shower spray at this moment with the hotter setting on and the last thing she wants eight now is for us to change her routine. She´s a big girl, she can take this”. By the end of my little speech the two men were looking at me dumbstruck.

I shrugged my shoulders and went on my way upstairs to my bedroom where a very composed Elsa was brushing her damp hair furiously, she had changed into a long nightgown and her skin had a red tint to it from the scalding water. I assessed her state and went straight to bed.

“I don´t want special treatment”, she demanded, looking at me through the mirror in front of her. “I wasn´t hurt, I killed him, I´m no victim. End of story”.

“I didn´t say any different”, I told her.

I could see her skin looked irritated, she´d probably scrubbed herself with the same delicacy she was bestowing on her hair at the moment, threatening to yank it out of its roots. I felt an unprecedented pinch in my chest and I quickly decided it was because I didn´t like to see her like this if it wasn´t by my hand.

So before I reached the bed, I turned around and headed to the boudoir where she was seated in a small stool. Her eyes raised to mine expectantly and I put the brush down and started massaging her strained shoulders. I had never seen her like this and I decidedly didn´t like it, I was not up for taking care of a distressed teenager and I particularly didn´t like this specific teenager being like this. Her whole body tensed, her fight or flight response activating at my touch but as I pressed on her knots, that nervous energy ebbed away.

“He did touch me”, she confessed a long while later. I was in bed and she was on the floor as always, none of us asleep. “He came behind me, I didn´t hear him”, her voice became lower as she retold the encounter, “he said my hair smelled good and he took my rubber band so it would hang low instead of being up in a ponytail. Then he put his hand on my… my hip and the other on my…”, sharp intake of breath, “breast and told me I was beautiful and I froze”, cue the anger. “I froze, after all my training, all my remarks. All my power was gone. It wasn´t until he tried to take my shirt off that I was able to move again. I feel angry at myself that I froze. I know it could have been much worse but I just feel his hands everywhere. I don´t ever want to feel that powerless again. Not ever”.

“Get up”, I ordered her, doing the same myself and turning the light on.

“What? Why?” nevertheless she did it and was able to catch the switchblade I threw at her. 

“You said you didn´t want to freeze again. Let´s make sure that doesn´t happen”.

And then I lunged at her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What did you think about the Joker's gesture?


	14. Why you kept me around

“I don´t like this”, Frost pronounced, seating across from me.

“I´m jumping at the idea”, was Elsa´s sarcastic reply. “I don´t know what you are complaining about, you aren´t the ones going with her”.

“You agreed to do it”, I reminded her.

“But I didn´t know Harley was going to be the one in charge or that neither of you were coming along. It´s going to be a nightmare”.

“The Joker isn´t going either”, added Frost crossing his arms over his chest. “He´s meeting someone important, his words”.

“Should I be honored he trusts I´m well enough to rob a bank with his demented girlfriend and a bunch of henchmen who hate me?” she sassed.

“This is a test for Harley more than it is for you. It´s her first job without the Joker, she sure as hell was excited last night”.

“We could all hear it Doc, we could all hear it”, said Frost scrunching his forehead in disgust. “Harley has thrown herself into her training, I´d say it´s admirable if she wasn´t so freaking annoying. I doubt she´d try something against you, she´ll be eager to prove herself so she´ll handle the hostages. She´ll probably send you to retrieve the money to the basement, make you carry the bags, that sort of thing, physical labor but you can take her on if it gets out of control. You have more experience both robbing banks and in a fight. The Joker trusts your judgment and that you´ll take the right call if things go south”.

“I´m carrying one of my butterfly knives, he gave it to me yesterday when he explained the whole plan to me. I was eager to do something after more than three months dusting off my skills, I shouldn´t have fallen into his trap”.

“He still had one of your knives?” I asked, astounded.

“It´s the one I stabbed him with in his chest”, she explained. “Sentimental value, I guess”.

“Sure”, Frost mumbled conspiratorially and I smiled while Elsa rolled her eyes.

Her dye was starting to go away and now her platinum blond roots were showing and she had a psychedelic look about her as the Joker had so graciously pointed out the day before, earning him an elbow in the ribs.

“Have fun little one”, wished her the devil himself when he interrupted our little gathering to rub her head and rile her up before going to the meeting Frost had mentioned earlier. “Harley is waiting for you by the van already”.

Both me and Frost patted her back to wish her good luck as she fixed her hair and plastered a smile on her face.

“It´s going to be a carnage”, Frost murmured when we saw her get into the white van followed by Harley who had donned a harlequin outfit and white and black makeup to show who she was working for as if the clown masks everyone else wore wasn´t indication enough.

“Let´s just hope you´ve trained her well and that Harley can rein in her jealousy”.

“You´re hoping for a miracle old friend”.

≈

Things went wrong from the outset. I had some difficulty getting into the van because my right knee had trouble bending even after all the surgeries and so instead of simply hopping in like the rest of them, I had to sit on the edge and then hoist my legs up and stand up carefully and Harley wasn´t having it. So she kicked me with her stupid bat in the back and I let out a grunt and stood up to face her but she just let out her irritating high-pitched laugh and held on to one of the leather straps hanging from the two metallic bars attached to the roof of the van on the inside so we could stand up without stumbling on the inside of the van.

I grasped mine and prayed she would get caught and sent back to Arkham only this time as a patient and not a doctor. Instead of focusing on her mocking grimace and stinging remarks about me being an old and slow grandma followed by the snickers of the henchmen, I got out my butterfly knife and started turning it in my free hand, repetitive actions to avoid a confrontation I might lose as the men clearly would support her and not me. 

“Where did you get that from?” Harley asked breaking off her tirade about how much of a burden I was, to stare at the weapon in my hand.

“It´s mine”, I replied.

“He went through all that trouble to get something that wasn´t even his?” he hissed in disbelief.

“What are you talking about?”

“When I broke him out, he made me take him to the room where we keep all our patient´s belongings to take that knife even though the asylum had gone into lockdown due to the time we wasted to get that scrap of metal and it was more difficult to escape. All for your damn knife”.

“Was that before or after he put you through the electroshock treatment?” I smirked at her.

She snarled and lunged at me but this time I knew what to expect and dodged her bat but slashed her arm in return. She didn´t have the opportunity to retaliate as the van stopped abruptly and all of us surged forward, the only thing keeping us upright were the hand holders. The men started putting on the clown masks but the psycho stopped them.

“Not yet, we are picking a guy up. The Joker said he´s an expert in saves”.

That was my first indicator that this wasn´t our run-of-the-mill job as I knew for a fact that I was the Joker´s safe expert. I hadn´t spent more than half of my life cracking open the small boxes my father used to leave around the house and then the Joker had taken to leaving in our bedroom containing things they´d stolen from me so that I would have an incentive not to ignore them. I hadn´t needed that as I did it for fun, I loved tinkering with them and pressing into them so small compartments would pop out with riddles and puzzles. I enjoyed the logical part of it, that´s why I was so good at handling finances and numbers in general and why my father had employed me as an accountant early on.

The warm feeling I´d got when Harley had told me the Joker had purposefully jeopardized his escape from Arkham just to retrieve my knife, disappeared when I learned he had found a substitute for me where the saves were concerned. So that´s why I was looking intently at the new guy as he hopped confidently into the back of the van and placed himself in front of me. And that´s why I was the only one who identified him. Well, that and the electric current that swept my whole body and left me tingling all over. Secret meeting my ass.

In that moment I realized I would be able to recognize him anywhere, mask and padding or not, it was like we were connected by an electrified wire that zapped us when the other was in close proximity. 

He took a second to look a look at Harley´s new injury and then his eyes met mine, I didn´t give any outward sign of having recognized him. As I was checking of my own padding was correctly attached to my body, to man closest to Harley inquired about the bulky material that covered my torso and part of my legs.

“It´s padding so no one will be able to tell I´m female”, I answered him.

“It´s so daddy won´t know his sweet princess is running around with the Joker´s men instead of locked up. You´re such a hypocrite”, spat Harley. “You are the only female apart from me in the team and you´re high profile in the criminal underworld. You don´t want to associate yourself with us, you don´t want anyone to know how devious you truly are”.

It was true the mafia didn´t rob banks, they had a more “sophisticated” way of getting money via blackmail, extortion, torture… you name it, but they would never sully their hands with something so “ordinary” as robbing banks. My father would be shocked to see me doing this so the Joker and I had agreed that I would disguise my silhouette every time we went on a job. Plus, my family and the police believed I had spent five months of my life chained to a radiator, not running around with the Joker so to preserve my anonymity and therefore my innocence, it was better if no one knew there was an unidentified woman on the Joker´s crew at the same time I´d been with him, I had a reputation to think about after all.

“It´s so my father won´t find us, you nutcase!” I lied through my teeth. “If he knew there was a female working with the Joker matching my physical description he´d do anything to interfere in one of our jobs to get me back and then he´d go after the Joker. But if he thinks I´m in the lair, he won´t trouble himself with us because he wouldn´t want to anger your boss. So make no mistake, I´m doings this for you as much as I´m doing it for myself!” the words had come out of my mouth so quickly I was surprised they even made sense.

The outburst managed to leave them speechless for a couple of minutes but then the goon beside me thought it necessary to make the question I most dreaded.

“So what is it with you and the boss?” Seeing as my silence wasn´t enough deterrent, he continued. “I mean, I get why he took you the first time, made a pretty sweet deal out of keeping you but now? He isn´t blackmailing your family any more or we wouldn´t be robbing banks. So why are you here?”

“Don´t underestimate his greed, maybe he´s still getting money out of my family but just wants us to get more on the side”, I responded flippantly, avoiding looking at the dark, hungry eyes staring at me behind the blue contacts and a clown mask.

“I don´t think that´s it”, he shook his head and the other men made noises to show they agreed with him. “I wouldn´t say he´s kinder to you but he seems more… human. He sleeps with you every night and you´re no better of a fighter than we are, not with your injuries”. I beg to differ young man. “So the only reason I can think of is that he fucks you senseless every night because if it isn´t that, then he´s in love”. I almost choked at that. “There´s no other reason he´d keep a burden like you around”. Ouch.

“Geez. Neither of you have seen me fight”, I felt the need to defend myself, feeling Harley burning holes into the side of my face. “And I´d say I´m a pretty decent fighter. On top of that, he has enough action in the sex department with Harley, he doesn´t need me for that, nor would I agree to it”, I was quick to add when I heard the Joker´s snort which everyone else overlooked.

“So you expect us to believe he keeps you around for, what? Nostalgia? Come on, you must really be a good fuck to keep him hooked even after six years”, he leaned into me and his disgusting breath hit me in full force.

“Either way, if that were the reason he´s keeping me alive, I don´t think he´d be agreeable to you touching me”. I put my blade against his aorta with a charming smile. “And for that matter, neither would I”.

I had never understood the fascination that my sexual relationship with the Joker or lack thereof sparked in people. Everyone had been curious about it, their own fears overriding logical thinking. The Joker had never raped any of his victims, not once, and I had been fifteen when he kidnapped me and not inclined to get down to do it with him, might I add. So why did everyone always assume we had done it? I couldn´t follow their reasoning because it was too poor for me to even contemplate so I just ignored the stares and the comments. If they focused on that, they wouldn´t focus on the fact that their patient had emotional responses that did not correlate with trauma victims, at least until I perfected my facial expressions and “symptoms” but they had all been too focused on an imaginary sexual relationship to notice the little tells that outed me as not being their normal hostage. 

And once they moved on from that, I had become the perfect liar, mask in place, not a chink in my armor. At first, at least, then it had all come crashing down.

“He just feels guilty about maiming you”, interrupted Harley and I saw the Joker roll his eyes.

“Is that what you tell yourself at night after he leaves your bed to go to her?” mocked her one of the henchmen.

“I was his psychiatrist, I know him better than anyone!” she screeched.

“If there´s one thing that´s true about him is that he´s unpredictable, nobody knows him, just the part of himself he chooses to show you and even then he´s so good at lying that you´re wondering the whole time if that is his true self. You should know that better than anyone, Doctor”, I couldn´t help my satisfied smirk.

“You think you know him so well, don´t you?” she snarled and if looks could kill I would be six feet under. “You know nothing! You´re just a little girl he keeps around out of pity, not love or whatever stupid connection you´ve deluded yourself into thinking you have with him! You´re just a toy and when he grows bored of you, it´ll be just like the last time only this time around he´ll kill you for real”.

“He can try”, that shut them up. Well, that and the fact that the van had stopped.

We put on our masks and started jumping out of the van, the men were clutching their machine guns to their chests while running up the stairs to Gotham National Bank. The Joker got off just before I did and as I was lowering myself to go down more smoothly, Harley pushed me from behind and I would have fallen face first into the concrete if he hadn´t caught me. 

“You owe me for this, you big oaf!” I protested, hitting his chest as we ran after the mad woman.

As expected, Harley sent me and the Joker to the level below so we could open the safe and carry the money back upstairs in five duffel bags while she handled the ground floor with the others. The Joker disposed of two of the guards bringing his gun down on their heads while I knocked out the remaining one hitting his head against the wall with a powerful kick that hurt my leg but made me feel proud of myself.

“Bad fighter my ass. Honestly, I liked it better when your men were like you in the sense that all your IQ´s together didn´t come close to mine”, I huffed reaching the metal door that was the only barrier between the safe and us.

He proceeded to get it open with one of his tools, burning the lock while people screamed on the floor above.

“It´s true he was quite incisive in his questioning. My bad”, he shot down the security cameras. “Did you know it was me from the start?”

“Give me some credit. I may be here out of pity but I do have some brains”.

“Oh, come on. We both know you´re here because of the awesome sex”.

I couldn´t suppress a smile at that and I shook my head as I got to work, it wouldn´t do to get caught after all no matter how much I enjoyed our conversations. I found it interesting how everyone became so fixated with the labels of “murderer”, “sociopath” and “domestic terrorist” and he certainly was all of that but apart from it he was incredibly witty and intelligent and had a sarcastic dry humor that matched mine. Those qualities didn´t redeem him or his “heinous acts” like my mother was so fond of saying, but what really struck me as odd was no one had bothered to look deeper into it, to really look at him.

Maybe he had a conscience and maybe he didn´t but he had his quirks like any other person like the cucumber thing and on a deeper level he also had cravings. He craved company, real company, not sexual release like the one Harley provided. I knew his rapport with Harley would never go beyond that, he´d never share his plans with her or tell her things about himself or cradle her beaten body and he definitely wouldn´t hold her to himself in the throes of a nightmare.

Because he also had those, just like any other human on the planet. When he had been accosted by them in the past, he had crawled out of bed to join me on the floor still half asleep and he had put his head on my chest and crushed me against him. The first time he´d done that I´d been sure he was going to kill me, he´d come over to me and laid on the floor beside me, by that point I had had one of his stolen switchblades at hand. In the end, he just took ahold of my waist and turned me around so that I´d be facing him and brought me against him so that every part of me was in contact with his front. 

I had gripped the handle of the knife firmly when he had rested his head beneath my chin and felt that brief pang of fear only for it to disappear a second later.

“I´m not going to bite you”, he´d said groggily.

I hadn´t dared reposition myself until I had been sure he was asleep but he had had an iron grip on my waist and I hadn´t been able to move much so I had found a comfortable position with him sleeping on me and I had stayed awake the rest of the night in case his free hand tried to creep up my neck and strangle me. 

The morning after he had made no comment about the whole thing, he had just disentangled himself from me, reapplied his makeup and got on with his life. That episode hadn´t repeated itself often, four times maximum and in the end there was no need for him to move me, I did it of my own accord. 

And although it didn´t happen often, it lent me some insight into how lonely he really was, he didn´t confide in his men, not even Frost. Everyone feared him and he certainly got off on that but that meant he was isolated and I reckoned that was one of the reasons he had made me sleep in his room, obviously not the only one as he needed to prevent me from escaping. Nonetheless that four nights had let me see the small grains of humanity he had buried deep within himself.

I´d never say we had a deep understanding of each other but I´d say he had let me see parts of himself he had never shown anybody else and that had been reciprocal as I had never felt better than when I was with him. No fear of seeming weird or of having to perform all kinds of social rituals that I found useless, no need to put on a human mask.

“So are you here to keep an eye on that witch or on me?” I enquired.

“You tell me, you are the one with the brains, missy”, he retorted.

I thought about it as I opened the actual safe and not the door blocking our way with the tools we´d brought. He never did anything without a reason even if it seemed like that at first. Sooner or later all the pieces of the puzzles fell into place and it was at that moment that people realized he was truly a genius, a deranged and destructive one but a genius nonetheless.

As soon as the safe door opened, he grabbed three of the bags and passed me the other two as I shot the three remaining cameras and started putting the money inside the bags and realized they were actually quite heavy when full to the brim with green valuable pieces of paper.

“Are you going to be able to carry them and run?” he asked me without pausing his work.

“I´ll manage”, I said hanging one on my right shoulder, testing its weight and then did the same with the other one so my gun hand would be free.

I swayed a little to the sides but I was positive I´d be able to make it to the van.

“The fact that you told her we were picking up a saves experts makes me think you had deduced she was going to place me on the most physical role of the job”, I began as he was filling up the last bag. “So you made sure you´d be placed with me in case I tried to make a run for it or to assure I didn´t screw the whole thing up if I hadn´t been able to carry the bags and run at the same time”, I was positive he would´ve killed me if that had been the case. “But you could´ve done exactly the same thing and meet us and the bank instead of carpooling with us, that suggests you wanted to see how Harley handled the men all by herself and how she interacts with me when she thinks you´re not watching. Sneaky and effective”.

“I´m so glad I earned your seal of approval”, he said, zipping up the bag.

“You didn´t trust she wouldn´t try to kill me?” I asked, stalling for time before he went back to being mute in front of the others and because I wanted to know the answer as well.

“More like the other way around. You have years of experience on her, but I was curious whether she´d beat you black and blue with her bat to be honest”.

“Would you have done anything to stop her if she had?” I inquired climbing up the stairs.

The commands from his men were getting louder the closer we were to the ground floor as were the cries of the hostages. He meditated his answer until he caught me at the top of the stairs, still hidden from the view of everybody else, the police sirens blaring in the distance.

“You know I don´t believe in coddling people, you get what you´re not strong enough to stop so, yeah, I would´ve let her have her fill with you but if she had come close to ending your life, I´d have put a bullet through her skull”.

“Glad to know”, I muttered under my breath.

“Stay close to me little one. This is about to get bumpy”.

He got out his gun and shot two of his henchmen as soon as we reached the foyer where everyone was assembled. I had to hurry to place myself behind him as we stood out the fire from the rest of the team who probably thought we´d made an alliance to run away with the money and kill them in the process.

“You know, there are easier ways to dispose of unruly employees”, I informed him as one of the bullets almost grazed my cheek as we stood behind a marble pillar with him facing me and for a moment I missed seeing his painted face instead of a hideous mask.

“But none of them are as amusing”, he replied firing two more shots as soon as our attackers stopped to reload. “Morons”.

“You are ruining everything!” screeched Harley.

“There´s one still alive, to your three”, I said, risking a quick glance risking my neck.

“No, I was missing two, now I´m missing one”, he said shooting down the man I had pointed out to him.

That left me confused, there were no more men, only Harley and I doubted he had invested time in her training only to kill her on her first real job, so who else was there to kill? As I was mulling the answer, one of the walls of the bank came down all of a sudden and an ugly yellow school bus appeared in the middle of the wreckage. The hostages screamed at the sudden development, some even managed to sneak past us and run out of the building, others were too afraid or hesitant to move.

The sirens were getting closer and I could hear Harley dragging her bat making a scratching sound against the floor, another fear tactic just like the ones her boyfriend employed when he stomped his foot as he approached his prey or when he cackled. In the exact moment the bat hit the marble, the Joker pushed my shoulders down so that I would duck as I was pressed against the stone. At the same time, he shot the bus driver who´d got out of the vehicle when he´d seen the bodies of his fallen coworkers among the rubble.

“You traitorous bitch!” the madwoman screamed when she came around the pillar and tried to smash my head in but I was quicker and did a roundhouse kick that swept her feet off her and she fell down.

That´s when the Joker tugged me after him so we´d make a run for the bus and escape, police officers already on the stairs to the bank shouting at us to freeze and put our hands in the air. 

To this day, I still don´t know how I did it but I was able to hear the scorned woman shout something and then cock her gun. I turned around mid-run and fired at her before she could get the bullet through the Joker´s shoulder blades where she was aiming. The bullet pierced her shoulder and she had no other choice but to drop the weapon as she cried out in agony.

The two of us climbed into the bus and I placed myself behind the wheel and sped out of the place in the blink of an eye, crouched down low as shots rained on us.

“Where is our second getaway car?” I shouted over the noise of the police cars chasing us. The Joker squatted down next to me so none of the bullets would hit him.

“You´ll have to lose them first, honey”.

“You could have chosen a more inconspicuous vehicle, genius”, I spat, adrenaline coursing through my veins. “I didn´t kill her, by the way, just slowed her down considerably. There´s a chance the police will catch her, though. That could prove to be problematic if she tells on me. I doubt she´ll betray you but she won´t have the same qualms about stabbing me in the back”.

“Well, you just shot her”, he snorted and I snapped my teeth at him. “She´ll say nothing, she knows if she tells on you, then they´ll find me too because it is unlikely the Joker will let you ran away with an unidentified male with his money. Either way, they won´t find the factory either as the men are moving everything as we speak, we´re changing lairs. In the meantime, you and I are going to evade police capture and meet them in two days”.

“Two days? Where are we going to go?”

“Have a little faith. Now, lose those cars and let me take care of the rest”. He patted my knee and then left his hand on my thigh, idly tracing patterns with his fingers.

“Was that part of your test as well?” I asked him, swerving to the right.

“What are you talking about?” He could´ve fooled anyone with his innocent voice but not me.

“By killing your own men you made sure Harley thought I was ditching you for the new guy to escape you and so she´d get angry and try to kill you. You wanted to see if I´d shoot her to save you or let her kill you and escape. Bit risky”, he chuckled.

“You´re seeing too much into it, I´d never go that far to test you”.

“Right”, I scoffed. “And you´re covering your back as well because as far as Harley knows I just ran away with a stranger, not you, so if she does snitch after all, my father will no   
longer be after you because I´m supposedly no longer in your delightful company”.

He let out an impressed whistle. “You know? It´s uncanny how far back you can see into my plans. I feel naked”, he said, unstrapping my padding, making sure his hands made plenty of contact with my back and stomach and I shivered.

“One just has to pay attention to you”.

“Not everyone is willing or brave enough to see behind the face paint”.

“Well, I guess now we know why you kept me around”, he emitted a throaty chuckle.


	15. Meatballs and hospitality

I had been in the same dingy room for hours now, they´d patched me up but hadn´t given me any painkillers. I was livid, itching to tell the Joker what his little traitorous rat had done as soon as he busted me out of the police station because I had every faith in him. 

He wouldn´t leave me behind, he might be angry I hadn´t stopped the traitor before she had wreaked havoc and ran away with the man he´d recommended for the job but it hadn´t been my fault. Who could have predicted those two would come up with a plan of their own and kill everyone in the process? 

My shoulder stung badly and I feared I´d have trouble bending my right arm from there on but I´d find and kill that bitch if it was the last thing I did. As those thoughts were running through my head, the door finally opened and a man I recognized as Commissioner Gordon from the news stepped into the room and sat before me. The bolted metal table I had been shackled to, between us.

Gordon had a folder with him with files on me which he spread over the surface of the table. Pictures of my old weaker self, my university diploma and pictures of the Joker and Elsa were strewn over the table.

“So… Dr. you´ve been taken quite an unconventional career path”, was the first thing he said to me in his faintly nasal voice, his moustache bobbing up and down as he spoke. “Care to enlighten me as to why a promising and mentally sound individual would fall for the Joker´s antics and end up robbing a bank?”

I stayed silent, I had no intention of answering any of his questions.

“Joker got your tongue as well as your sanity?” he prompted. “Tell me about this young woman”, he tapped one of Elsa´s photographs, her hair was an icy blond, it looked like a school picture.

I knew he was fishing, they had no proof of Elsa being in Gotham so the fact that they had connected the Joker´s break out with her pissed me off. She was nothing to him! Why did everyone asume he would go after her? It was me he wanted!

“I didn´t know the police had any business tracking down school girls”, I snarled. “Don´t worry, I´ll kill her myself the next time I see her and save you the trouble, I´ll even send her body to the station so that you can stop wasting your resources on her”.

“I see you two have not got on well”. That was the understatement of the decade.

“She jeopardized my robbery and fled with another man. I think it´s safe to assume the Joker won´t be pleased with that. Hell, maybe he´ll kill her himself. After all he has a record of tracking her down”, I mused to myself.

“Do you know the nature of their relationship Ms. Quinzel?” I growled at being addressed by that name I no longer answered to.

“That´s Harley Quinn for you!” I stated, irate. “And as for the relationship between them I think you would have already reached the conclusion that it´s just pity”.

“Can he feel that? Isn´t he a sociopath?” he inquired, scribbling on a notepad.

“He´s not crazy!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “He´s more intelligent than all of you insignificant rats put together and he´ll kill you all for how you´ve treated me! You´ll regret the day you locked me in here!”

His eyes opened wide at my declarations but he returned to his impassive façade quickly enough only I had seen it, I´d been trained to detect those kinds of micro expressions as in my field it could mean the difference between being attacked by a patient or jumping back in time. Jim was afraid and I relished it so it came as no surprise when he intoned:

“Dr. Harleen Quinzel or however you want to be called, I hope you enjoy your stay in Arkham”.

I laughed psychotically at that and he cringed in his seat.

≈

The first opportunity of escape came almost three weeks after I´d been taken. The Joker had appointed one of his henchmen as my chaperone as he went away to an important meeting with Frost. By some miracle I was able to convince the dunderhead his boss had agreed to let me walk around the enormous property we lived in. I knew we were in a big state by all the acres of trees that could be seen from practically every window of the palatial mansion.

So approximately forty-five minutes after the Joker had left in his car, I was dressed in black comfortable clothes and running shoes, prepared to escape the madhouse. I decided to leave my dress behind as it would only slow me down and it wasn´t like I liked it all that much anyway. I did look for my butterfly knife but it was nowhere in our room and sneaking around trying to find it would have only arisen suspicion. So in the end, the guard and I went out and I immediately put my plan in motion.

“Do you want to play hide and seek?” I made sure to blink extra fast when posing the innocent question as soon as we were out of eyesight from the two men at the mansion doors with machine guns.

“Uh… I don´t know if it´s a good idea”, he rubbed the back of his head while I felt close to elation at how dubitative he was because that meant he could be swayed. “I´m supposed to keep you in my sight at all times”.

“Oh, come on!” I encouraged him feigning frustration. “Nobody will know, I´ve been confined in that house for almost a month, I need to stretch my legs or I´ll go crazy”, that´s when the pout kicked in.

“Eh…” he really wasn´t the most brilliant of the lot.

“Pretty pretty pleeease”, I made sure to lengthen the last word to convey how desperate I was to play with him, I also put on my best puppy eyes to drive my point further. “You´ll hide and I´ll look for you”, I kept saying, “it´ll be fun”. And it´ll probably get you killed.

“Okay”, he acquiesced in the end.

I hid my face in the trunk of a tree and started counting down from eighty while he scurried away trying to find the perfect hiding place in what looked like a small sized forest. As soon as I couldn´t hear his pounding footsteps, I started walking briskly away from the mansion, still counting out loud so he wouldn´t catch on to me too fast.

I started running faster and faster the farther I distanced myself from the lavish house. I could feel my heart pumping blood and adrenaline into my bloodstream, the only sound I could hear was my heartbeat I my ears and my feet hitting the terrain as I pushed my muscles to work harder and harder, I couldn´t risk getting caught.

I definitely understood the saying “cried in relief” when I saw the outside gate and how it wasn´t guarded. The only problem being the estate was surrounded by a tall brick wall I wouldn´t be able to climb over because the surface was completely smooth and so I couldn´t hold on to anything. Therefore, my only way out was the wrought iron gate.

I held onto the bars and using my upper body strength and pushing up with my legs, I managed to get to the top with great difficulty, calloused hands, sweating profusely, panting and having wasted quite a bit of time. I somehow managed to avoid the arrowhead that stood as a decorative element on top of the gate as well. 

Sitting precariously on the gate, I saw with something akin to despair as the Joker´s car sped towards me and I punched my thigh, cursing my own weakness for not having climbed fast enough. My body deflated all at once and tears of frustration prickled in my eyes but I didn´t let them fall as I saw my long-awaited chance of escaping turning to dust as the clown stepped out of the car with a mocking smile on his face and clapping in slow motion.

“What am I going to do with you now, little monkey?” he chastised me like I was a little girl.

“Let me go”, I replied, head held high and holding on to everything I had to the gate, not wanting to fall down in front of him after he had thwarted my plan.

“Climb down”, he ordered me, all mockery gone from his tone but I only shook my head in defiance. “I´ll shoot you”, he threatened taking his gun out.

“If you kill me, my father won´t pay you anymore and he´ll come for you”.

“I didn´t say I would kill you, I said I´d shoot you. I think shooting you in the abdomen will accomplish the task of getting you down and not killing you at the same time”.

I thought about it for a few seconds, willing my mind to come up with a solution to my predicament but as soon as he cocked his gun, knowing full well he wasn´t bluffing, I initiated my pitiful descent, my body cramping and trembling from the exertion of running and then climbing.

“I do believe this is the first time I´ve seen you cry”, he told me, grabbing a firm hold of my arm as soon as my feet hit the ground. “I like it”.

We both knew it hadn´t been caused by emotional pain, only by frustration and only because I hadn´t been concentrating enough to stop that traitorous tear from falling as I´d been too busy trying not to get impaled on the metal arrowhead.

“Don´t get used to it”, I snarled.

He laughed harder at that and then opened the back door of the car so I could seat while he rode shotgun. I recriminated myself for having underestimated the distance between the mansion and the gate because that miscalculation had cost me my freedom and had left me reduced to a sweaty angry mess in the back of a car driven by a man who looked uncannily like me as the man on the copilot´s seat talked to himself with a switchblade in his hand, tracing the blade with the tips of his fingers.

“How does it feel to have failed?” the clown taunted me, cruelly.

“Like I tried”, I responded, clenching my jaw.

“I guess that´s not much of an achievement in your book, Elsa. I bet you´re used to getting what you want with just a flutter of those long lashes and a dazzling smile”.

“I haven´t got where I am just by being pretty”, I said, a muscle jumping in my jaw.

“True, you got here because you were brave”, he chortled. “Or stupid, hard to tell. You were courageous that night and yet today you took the cowardly route and tried to run away. How come?”

“You´re not as charming as you think you are”, I spat. “And your hospitality sucks”. He gasped dramatically, feigning offense.

“Do you want to know what I think?” he hummed in a conspiratorial whisper as if he was about to share a secret with me.

“Not particularly”.

“Humor me”, I nodded and he saw me on the inside mirror so he shared his theory with me. “You see Elsa, you´ve grown accustomed to everyone being at your feet, below you. If you could not beat them physically, you could always outsmart them and that´s a good strategy, keeps you alive. But then I came into your life and everything changed”.

“That´s a bit pretentious, don´t you think?” He ignored my jab and kept talking.

“Suddenly you´re not the smartest person around and you can´t beat me in a fight either so you decide to flee because that makes you feel uncomfortable, unsettled, uneasy”.

“Impressive”, I muttered at his list of synonyms, he shushed me.

“And so our little Elsa decides to run, she decides to desert, to abandon the fight and go back to where it is safe, to what she knows. But you see, I can´t let you do that because if there is one thing I despise is fear and weakness and I won´t stand for it”.

“I´m not weak, wanting to escape a potentially dangerous situation doesn´t make me weak, it´s evolution at its finest”.

“So you´d rather go back to a family you don´t even miss”, when he said this, he turned around in his seat so he was looking straight at me, “than stay and confront your fears”.

“I´m not scared of you”, I breathed, leaning in until our noses almost touched.

“No”, he licks his lips. “I don´t think you are”.

Being so close to me made me think that maybe he didn´t know details about my life like at what age I had stopped caring for my mother or when my first teeth had fallen but those were easy to remember, they didn´t make up a person. He had the uncomfortable ability to read past that and get to what really mattered because looking at him was like looking at myself in a mirror. And I didn´t completely hate the image reflected back.

He understood, he really did. He understood what it was like to have your mind work so fast you could solve problems in the blink of an eye or what it was like to not be wired like everyone else, he knew what it was like to hear people talk about emotions and not have the ability to relate to that. He knew what it was like to be me and I knew what it was like to be him. We were two halves of the same coin only one had alienated himself from society and had decided to create his own twisted reality while I was chained to what society deemed appropriate. He was the freer version of myself with a horrible hair color and way more tattoos than I would ever have.

As soon as we got out of the car, the man he had appointed to watch after me, ran to us, obviously flustered about the mistake he´d made and fearful of the consequences. In a quick gesture, the Joker took out his gun and fired at him without even blinking. He blew the smoke coming off the barrel of the gun.

“It´s so hard to find competent help these days”, he whined in his high-pitched tone.

We sidestepped the body and entered the mansion. Frost walked away to gather some men to dispose of the body, I had an inkling the Joker had something else in store for me as I had showed weakness, or a desire for self-preservation as I preferred to call it; so I stayed by his side. 

Bracing myself for the plausible physical punishment that was to come in the near future, I went up the stairs, not behind him as that would set a negative precedent but right by his side. I knew trying to run away now would be an exercise in futility, and what´s more, my body was about to collapse as the adrenaline high was now a low and the strength was leaving my muscles.

My only consolation was the switchblade I had swiped from him and that was hidden in the waistband of my pants. He opened the door to our room with an exaggerated bow and I rolled my eyes, he closed the door behind us.

“Take off your pants”, his bony cheek was pressed against mine as he bent over me to whisper that into my ear.

I whirled around so fast I gave myself whiplash, getting the blade out in the process and pressed it against his carotid. My eyes were cold and my posture unflinching, warnings ringing in my head as loud as police sirens. He took a step forward and the blade nicked his skin but he didn´t even blink as a trail of blood started trickling down his throat. He didn´t react either as I pressed the blade harder against his skin, making the trickle a bit more abundant.

“Back off”, I barked.

His scars stretched wide as he smiled his characteristic feral grin that made everyone run for the hills, only problem was I had had my fill of running that day and I wasn´t about to let him intimidate me into compliance.

“I´m not a patient man, Elsa, so I suggest you do as I say”.

I looked into his eyes and I wasn´t able to discern lust in then or leeriness but I was still wary. Plus he wasn´t exactly an open book so reading him wasn´t exactly an easy task. Maybe he was just concealing his real intentions, God knew I had done that on a number of occasions. He wasn´t what you would call a trustworthy man either which translated into the switchblade still pressed against his throat. 

He didn´t give me time to come up with a clever response as he directed a well-placed punch to my gut and I doubled over with a pained gasp. He then grabbed my right wrist and flicked it forcefully until I let go of my only weapon, which gave me the chance to punch his side with my left fist which caused him to release my other hand.

I took a step back to try to gain some perspective but he wasn´t about to let me do that, he took up the space I had just created and came close enough to try to punch my chin, something I avoided by a hair´s breath. With his other hand however, he struck a blow against my left temple which left me dizzy, ears ringing and I stumbled sideways as I cried out.

He took advantage of my loss of balance and pushed me onto the bed so I made the most of that extremely vulnerable position and kicked him right in the chest with both my feet, trying to unbalance him but I didn´t even manage that.

“Get away!” I screeched, feeling for the first time in my life a stab of panic at seeing how my body wasn´t responding correctly to me as darkness was encroaching on my vision.

That loss of control over my body was startling to me and drove my panic to the point where I started hyperventilating, my thoughts weren´t making any sense either and my vision was clouded with dark spots so I wasn´t even able to place him in the room. I did however feel to hands on the waistband of my pants so I screamed at the top of my lungs hoping Frost or even Doc would hear my desperate plea.

I had never felt so defenseless but either way I kept fighting trying to land a punch or a kick at an opponent I couldn´t even see. I must have been too much of a nuisance because he pressed a pillow over my face and he smothered me until I lost consciousness.

I woke up hours later judging by how the room was only illuminated by the moonlight when I opened my drowsy eyes. The first thing I felt was an acute pain in my groin and I bit my lips to stop myself from screaming. A sweep of the room let me know he wasn´t there with me so that was a small relief because he wasn´t privy to how I rushed into the bathroom to throw up into the toilet bowl, product of how my panic from before had affected my organism like poison.

How could people live with so many emotions and still be sane? It was mind-boggling to me. As I sat there on my knees, throwing up, I thought how the pain wasn´t located in my vagina but on the hipbone area. So, deciding to take off the band aid in one go, I lowered the waistband of my pants and panties and saw there was gauze covering a small patch of skin a bit lower down from the hipbone, just under the elastic of the panties, not even on my mound but to the side of it. 

I lifted the gauze gingerly and saw he had made an incision that would scar but that didn´t look too deep, just a simple vertical line, a tally mark for the first time I had attempted to escape. I breathed a sigh of relief, it could have been much worse. The bastard could have chosen a different area, though, no need to give me a heart attack. If I hadn´t been overwhelmed by panic, I would have reached the conclusion that there was no history of sexual misconduct with my captor, he had never raped any of the hostages he took when he robbed banks. Feelings made you stupid and that was only more evidence to add to the pile.

I picked myself up and splashed some water on my ashen face and rinsed my mouth, then used his toothbrush and toothpaste to clean my teeth and felt better when I dunked the utensil on the toilet and then put it back on the sink. 

Weirdly enough, now that my stomach was empty I craved something to eat, even if it was stale crackers so, mindful of the hour, I tiptoed down the stairs and went into the kitchen, only after having recovered the switchblade from the floor where it had fallen during our fight. Just before pushing the door open, an electric tingle in the back of my neck let me know my mercurial roommate was in the room too.

To my surprise, he was cooking, a delicious smell wafted from the cooking station and my mouth watered. I thought it strange that he was doing something so mundane or that he even knew how to cook actual food as he was an extremely picky eater. He didn´t eat much but when he did, it was always from my plate and always something I had cooked, if one of his men had been the one to cook that particular meal he wouldn´t touch it. So more often than not, I found myself in that room, if only to make sure he wouldn´t starve to death and I had taken to making my rations bigger as he only ate from my plate, the cheeky asshat.

I got closer, wanting to see what he was preparing and I saw a brown sauce and meatballs; I had to admit to myself they looked and smelled delicious so risking his rage, I dipped my finger in the sauce, uncaring of how hot it was and tried it. It was actually pretty good and I let out a pleased sound. He didn´t acknowledge my presence, he kept stirring the sauce and watching the meatballs so they wouldn´t burn.

On the counter behind me there was a glass of milk and an empty plate beside it. That´s when I realized the oven was on too and a single chocolate cookie was baking inside it. For a second I wondered if he was sleepwalking but he seemed pretty alert to me, maybe he just liked to cook to relax himself or something.

“Why?” It was an open enough question so he could choose what he wanted to answer.

“Why not?” So he was being difficult about it.

“Why are you cooking at night?”

“I got tired of talking to you, you weren´t answering”, his eyes didn´t look for mine.

“I was unconscious”, he shook his head as if that was of no consequence. “Is this for me?”

“You said my hospitality sucked”, was his simple answer as if that explained everything and who knows, maybe for him it did.

We stood there in silence until he finished my dinner and then handed me one of the plates the henchmen had bought with the meatballs and the sauce, he also gave me a fork and as I ate quietly, he watched the cookie on the steel tray as it acquired a golden hue. He was a good cook, at least where meatballs were concerned and a small part of my brain found the fact that he had cooked me dinner because of a scathing remark, funny.

When he deemed the cookie was perfect, he opened the oven and took it out without gloves and then looked at his burnt fingertips for a few seconds with curiosity as I dipped the cookie in milk and ate it. He was a strange man indeed.

“You could have chosen a less conspicuous place”, he immediately knew what I was referring to because he took his eyes off his fingers and smiled cheekily at me.

“I could have but, where would the fun be in that?”

I shook my head as I washed the plates, the fork and the glass while he stood with his skinny legs brushing mine, twirling one of my hair strands in his bony fingers. He could never just stand, he had so much energy coiled inside that he had to always be doing something and as this was relatively harmless, I didn´t object to it.

“Did you do anything else I should be aware of?” I asked quietly, gripping the fork in my hand, calculating how much damage I could do with it.

“I picked my nose. And I farted. Twice”.

“I have a right to know”.

“I don´t abuse women, you know that. Even infuriating ones who try to escape by jumping over a fence”.

“I didn´t jump over it, I climbed it. I couldn´t jump over it even if I tried”.

He yanked my hair but not strongly enough to cause me pain. “Not even the more incorrigible ones who don´t know what a poetic license is and feel the need to answer everything with sarcasm”, he added with a fake sigh of exasperation. “Even if they do get on my nerves”.

“Yeah, well, where would the fun be otherwise?” I replied, throwing his words back at me and he splashed me with the water in the kitchen sink.


	16. Bumpy roadtrip

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: curse words and violence

“Doc! Were you in on this the whole time?” I greeted the old man with a big smile.

He was the one waiting on a car that would take us to the Joker only knew where, hidden under a creepy overpass with my enthusiastic Labrador in the backseat which I got into immediately so I could pet her. She licked my whole face clean and I deemed it thoughtful that he had arranged for May to be with us. It was probably because having her among the men as they were moving things would have proven to be too much of a hassle but it was thoughtful nonetheless.

“No kid, it was all the boss”, he answered, handing black plastic bags to the man as well as the car keys. “As soon as I get rid of the bus, there´ll be someone waiting with another car to take me to the new lair. I´m just your go-between if you wish”.

“Put these on”, the Joker told me throwing one of the bags at me. 

It contained a brunette wig, a fake ID for Bonnie Silverman and a change of clothes so I quickly stripped while he did the same on the outside of the vehicle while talking to Doc. I had to put on green contacts as well as an outrageously hideous blouse with a polka dot pattern and black jeans with knee-high boots in the same color.

“You know I hate polka dots”. 

I got out of the car to confront my companion but what I found almost made me burst out laughing and I say almost because if I had, it would have most certainly got me killed.  
He´d donned jeans and a non-descript long-sleeved black t-shirt with a nice pair of shoes and an aviator jacket, all very stylish. But the funny part was his curly haired wig which was in a color similar to mine only a bit lighter and the curls bounced on his head when he moved. That´s when I noticed he hadn´t been wearing paint on his face so now I stood face to face with a bare-faced Joker with ridiculous hair and casual clothing.

I´d seen him without paint up to his nose when I shaved his face but never fully without it and judging by the way Doc was struggling not to peek at his face, neither had he. The clown snarled, showing his teeth like a wild animal and I immediately reacted by tying a gray scarf around his neck so it would cover the lower part of his face because with or without makeup, his scars were easily recognizable. 

Without all the makeup to enhance and exaggerate the effect the scars had on his face he was actually quite a handsome man who didn´t look like he was even forty. I knew he hated his face, that´s why he never took off the paint apart from the fact that it was his signature look. He didn´t even wipe his face clean when he was alone with me and it didn´t bother me although it had driven me crazy at first how the paint would get in my clothes or hair when he propped his head on my shoulder but I had learnt to accept it as a side effect which I didn´t think about now.

So the fact that he was going to be bare-faced for two days just the two of us warmed a small part inside of me, the one reserved for people I actually liked. Rationally, I knew this wasn´t a grand romantic gesture or anything close to it, it was only so we could get away from Gotham until the storm passed as this meant he had less chances of getting caught while relocating and it gave the men the perfect window to move now that the most recognizable face of the operation was out of the picture. Plus, if Harley had snitched on me, the police would probably be looking for him out of town so no spotlight would be shined on the Narrows as he was supposed to be trying to track me down after I had eloped with a stranger. 

It all fit perfectly into the narrative but either way, I knew this wasn´t easy for him. However, all warm feelings evaporated after his confession.

“I know you hate polka dots. I bought it on purpose so you would look as ridiculous as I do with this damn wig on”. He looked like a disgruntled five-year-old.

I snorted at the word “bought” and he narrowed his eyes at me.

“Nothing can top that off”, I teased him and he groaned. “What am I supposed to call you now?”

“Richard Owens”, he replied unenthusiastically. “What a hopelessly ordinary name”.

“Bonnie Silverman”, I said, stretching my hand out to him. “Nice to meet you”.

“Quit being so sweet, you´re giving me a toothache”.

I rolled my eyes as he took some wads of cash from the bags and after saying goodbye to Doc, we got on the car. I was driving while he lounged comfortably in the backseat in case someone stopped us so he could pretend he was asleep with May next to him.

“Where to?” I asked.

“Turn right here”.

And that was how our torturous journey began. Apparently, he got a kick out of getting me pissed off because he would shout directions at the worst time possible or seconds before I had to make a turn, which forced me to do a U turn in more than one occasion while he snickered in the backseat. My teeth were gritted in anger and frustration and May had her head on my lap while he was having the time of his life. Luckily no one stopped us as I was taking secondary roads that were almost deserted or they would have found themselves with a bullet in their chest.

By the time the sky was completely dark and I´d been driving for hours at that point, my skull was threatening to split open due to the migraine that had been building as the hours dragged on with an unbearable and chuckling Joker who was very clearly toying with me. That was until I slammed the breaks and he was propelled forward and crashed against the back of my seat.

“What do you think you are doing?” he growled darkly but I was far too enraged to even answer him so I opened the door forcefully and stomped out of the car with May at my heels.

We were in the middle of nowhere, traversing a path that had vegetation on both sides of the car so I just started walking to blow off some steam or I knew I would kill him and I wouldn´t even bother to dig him a grave. He could go fuck himself. I was exhausted after driving all day without eating or drinking and my copilot was a complete and utter ass who acted like a spoiled child and at that time I simply couldn´t take any more of his bullshit.

May ran happily ahead of me, barking excitedly after being left to wander by herself and stretch her legs for the first time in more than five hours. I sat down hugging my knees and massaging my feet which were cramped after having driven for so long. My throat was parched and that did nothing to improve my migraine.

I knew I couldn´t stay for long or he would take the car and leave. Literally. But for now I just needed some distance from that insufferable man. How he could be so vexing I would never be able to understand. Did he wake up every day trying to top how annoying he had been the day before? Was it a competition against himself? 

On top of that, another thing that was running around in my head was the last bit of information Frost had shared with the Joker via text message. It seemed, my esteemed family had crashed against the transport that had been taking Harley to Arkham, presumably to question her on my whereabouts. Couldn´t they leave it alone? Were they really so thick?

Being with the Joker was like a drug to me, equally addictive and dangerous, by losing myself in everything Joker, I became free. Free from the expectations they had placed on my shoulders. With him I was no longer a Rinaldi, I didn´t have to put on a mask or answer stupid useless questions about how I was feeling every half hour.  
I had gone to Amsterdam for a reason and that was to get rid of them and their control over my actions and my health and instead of achieving that, they had sent my brother with me to monitor me closely. It would have been less invasive if he had attached a small camera to my forehead. He had been so controlling during the last two years that I had planned on killing him and going back to Gotham.

And the question stood about whether the she clown would tell them anything about my relationship with the Joker since I´d disclosed as little as possible about my time with him for years. They thought it was due to trauma, I knew better. Firstly, the thought of Arkham´s psychiatrists using everything I knew about him for his treatment didn´t seat too well with me. And secondly, my memories were my own, my private recollection of all the good and bad times we had had together and I wasn´t going to divulge them.

All my doctors had agreed the reason I still had nightmares was because I had suppressed all the trauma I had been through, not speaking of my experiences and so it resurfaced when my guards were down, in other words, while I slept. And they may have been right but the reason I wasn´t sharing anything with them was because if they really knew, I would have been placed in a cell right next to the Clown Prince of Crime.

If I had admitted out loud that I missed the scratching sounds as he scribbled furiously on his plans or the elation I felt every time I managed to wound him during one of our fights or how I felt as we robbed banks side by side or he took me to his meetings and listened to my advice… they would have institutionalized me in the blink of an eye.

When May came back after having relieved herself, I scratched her belly for a little while and after taking a deep breath, I stood up, testing my sore feet and legs to see if they would hold my weight. They seemed okay even though they complained sending waves of pain up to my waist but I soldiered on and walked to the car and got in on the passenger seat, facing the car window and trying to find a comfortable position to sleep in, snuggling May for warmth.

“What do you think you are doing?” he asked quietly but tersely, pulling on my hair sharply, forcing me to bend at an awkward angle and eliciting a sharp cry.

“I´m tired and dizzy and I have a migraine and frankly, you are insufferable. Either we sleep here so I can continue driving tomorrow or you drive since you already know where we are going. Your choice”.

“This is not the time to be funny”, he yanked harder until I was facing him upside down, my body contorted and my scalp burning.

“I´m not trying to amuse you”, I spat. “If I keep driving we are going to have an accident, I don´t feel well, I already told you”.

He took a long look at me, saw my glassy eyes, the pallor of my cheeks and heard the rumble of my stomach. In the end he sighed tiredly and let go of me, not without a last tug and got on the driver´s seat. I went back to my previous position with my head resting on the window and my body turned away from his.

“I knew I´d regret this”, he mutters as he turns the keys in the ignition. “Rest. I´ll wake you up when we get to the town so you can buy something at a grocery store, you delicate flower”, he sneered.

“I was the one driving the damn school bus and I´m the one that´s been driving for hours while you were lounging in the back laughing your ass off as you shouted directions at the worst time possible to irritate me. We haven´t stopped in hours and I haven´t eaten since breakfast so I have a right to be tired and hungry and the least you could do is take over for me. I´m not asking that much of you so you stick your condescending shit up your ass and in the meantime you could practice not being such a dick, for starters”.

He took ahold of my nape like a mother cat would do with her kittens and squeezed until I hissed in pain but he didn´t relive the pressure. I tried to wriggle out of his grasp but he had an ironclad grip on my neck and he wasn´t as exhausted as I was so that helped too.

“This counts as being a dick, just so you know”, I kept goading him.

“I would stop talking if I were you, sweetheart”.

That was a big warning sign right there, when he called me a different thing from ´little one´ it meant he was really pissed and I should stop pushing his buttons. But I wasn´t one to not fight back so instead I turned my neck and bit his wrist, feeling my teeth break skin and the metallic taste of blood on my tongue.

He let out a bad word and then slammed my head against the window so I retaliated by kicking him in the ribs while May was wise and escaped to the backseat but she still bared her teeth at the clown. He swerved brusquely and then his arm reached out and curved around my shoulders and dragged me against his side so my cheek was against his neck.

“Trust me kitten, you don´t want to play the biting game with me. I would hate to ruin that beautiful face. Who would you fool if I decided to bite off your cheek? Or your ear?” he nosed my temple, his tongue caressing the outer shell of my ear.

“Fuck you”.

I whispered as I got out one of his switchblades and stabbed his thigh with it. In response, his arm traveled to my neck as he kept driving without a hitch with a knife embedded in his leg and strangling a twenty-one-year-old at the same time. 

“Have I ever told you how incredibly attractive I find it when you stab me?” he whispered into my ear as black spots dominated my vision.

“Maybe Harley should do it more often”, I wheezed.

“She wouldn´t dare, she´s much too scared of me”.

“Maybe instead of trying on stupid lingerie ensembles, she should work on her bravery”, he was actually loosening his grip and I was able to inhale enough oxygen to remain conscious.

“Is that jealousy I detect?” he jested.

“She will never be at my level”, I got out with some trouble. “I don´t know if I´m capable of being jealous but if I was, I certainly wouldn´t feel threatened by a woman who thinks skimpy outfits turn you on”.

“Pray tell little one, what does turn me on?” he whispered seductively, his arm not crushing me anymore against him so I was able to sit normally once more after making sure he would not bleed out. Taking the knife out wouldn´t be wise so I resorted to watching as blood dripped on the upholstery.

“Oh, you know, the usual”, I answered, rubbing my bruised neck, “explosions and murder”.

He let out a dark chuckle and raised a surprised eyebrow but didn´t reply with a sarcastic comment. We drove in silence from there on until we reached a small and quaint coastal town with low buildings and wood cabins that reminded me of fairytales. It was a smart idea, living here for the next two days, no one would come looking for the Joker here, or for me for that matter. He parked in front of a small grocery stole whose owner was closing for the night so I got out in a rush and after a few kind words and desperate pleas and feigning distress, I managed to let me sneak in and buy a few prepackaged sandwiches as well as bandages and rubbing alcohol and as I paid him, I made sure to wink and flutter my eyelashes and then I got inside the car once more.

“Charming”, my companion drawled.

“You know me, charming as can be”, I replied.

“And sly as a fox”, he added.

“Yeah, that too”, I laughed.


	17. Nighttime confessions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW:There is scar worship at the end of the chapter.

He had rented a small wooden house that smelled of the sea and which interior was decorated with sea shells and small statues of mermaids, marine motives alike were abundant in every room, from paintings of boats to framed poems about the sea and pictures of the beach. The sea was within earshot and so we listened to the waves breaking on the beach as we sat down at the kitchen aisle and calmly ate our dinner. 

After that, he took off his pants after yanking out the knife which he dropped carelessly, staining the floorboards with blood. I rushed to place a towel on the sofa before he sat down and gathered the medical items I´d bought. I kneeled before him in between his legs and rubbed the alcohol on his wound, he didn´t flinch or make a sound. He just sat back and let me work in silence with his head resting on the sofa, eyes looking at the ceiling as I examined the stab wound and concluded it wasn´t nearly life threatening because that had not been my intention. I bandaged his thigh dilligently and then sat down, still between his legs.

“What does turn you on?” I asked softly.

Somehow disturbing the sound the waves made seemed disrespectful and so I spoke barely above a whisper. It intrigued me, we had discussed my menstruation and my not wanting kids before but I had never given much thought to what may turn him on or even if something did. Sometimes I had to remind myself that he was human just like everybody else but it still felt weird at times to think that the man before me had things he liked and disliked in the sexual department like everybody else. 

I was so used to seeing him treat his body like a machine that I had reached the conclusion that nothing really excited him, he slept when he needed to and he only ate when he felt like it and even then, only enough to keep him alive. So I reckoned sex was the same for him, when the urge came to him, he satisfied it and that was it but I had never considered there would be something specific that could turn on that desire and I was curious about it.

The first time I had stayed with him he hadn´t engaged in any sexual activity that I knew of with anyone even if some of the dancers at his club had practically thrown themselves all over him. At one point I remember thinking he was asexual but I had heard him in the woes of sexual congress with Harley, or more specifically, I had heard her, so that theory was moot. Maybe he just didn´t care enough about sex to actually go out of his way to get it but now that he had Harley at is beck and call, he engaged more often in that kind of activities.

“And you´re asking me that while you´re sitting there and I haven´t got my pants on?” he whispered back looking at me from the corner of his eye.

“Please”, I scoffed. “Like that would ever happen”, I shook my head, amused by the thought, especially since everyone had assumed that indeed, it had happened in the past.

“You wound me, woman”, he put a hand to his chest in mock hurt and I squeezed his unharmed thigh.

“Tell me”.

“Well, if you must know, Harley has this way of engulfing…”

“The truth”, I cut him off, raising myself from the ground and straddling his thighs, careful not to put too much weigh on the wounded leg.

He finally looked directly at me in the dark with only a sliver of moonlight illuminating the room, filling the room with haunting shadows, one of them our own with me sitting on top of him. A pose anyone else might have misconstrued as being a romantic or even a sexual one when in truth it was far from that. None of us were extremely fond of touching but there had been instances in the past when we hadn´t minded physical contact with each other and this was one of them.

To us, this posture wasn´t inherently sexual, not if neither one of us made any kind of advances, it was just us talking, nothing more and nothing less. It was also a bit of me borrowing warmth from his overheated body but that was incidental.

“What do you think?” he whispered in a throaty low voice as he resettled himself on the sofa to accommodate my weight.

“Contrary to popular belief, I don´t occupy my thoughts with what you might enjoy in bed”, I paused, “or against the wall or on the floor or wherever you two get down to it”.

“The papers will be disappointed to learn about that”.

“They´ll get over it”, I countered. “I don´t know that anything does turn you on”, I spoke earnestly now. “You don´t enjoy strippers or sexy clothing nor do watch pornographic content. Do you even masturbate?”

He didn´t answer my question, just stared back at me and smiled roguishly. 

“Do you find Harley attractive?” I wondered.

“Objectively”. So only in passing thought.

“Physical appearance doesn´t drive you, then?” Again, no answer. “Of course the act in itself has no meaning for you at all, no feelings attached to it either. Is it just an urge to shake off then?”

His only response was a slow blink. 

“I bet the psychiatrists at Arkham were extremely curious about it”.

“Why do you think they even let Harley become my personal doctor?”

“I admit I don´t remember much about her when she was present for some of my therapy sessions but she was blonde right?”

“Platinum blonde”, he corrected me with a smirk.

“I see”. I too let small cruel smile insinuate in my lips. “Should I feel offended that they tried to replace me with a cheap knock-off?”

“Well, I think it is safe to say their plan backfired”.

“Is that why you fried her brains? Because they tried to manipulate you using me indirectly?”

“Don´t be so self-centered, darling. Watching her scream and writhe in pain was a huge motivator too”, now his smile was positively feral and dangerous.

Too, he had said too which implied that his revenge had been partly due to the doctors trying to turn our relationship against him. They had probably thought they could manipulate him into telling Harley his deepest darkest secrets because she had similar colored hair to mine but that had turned out not to be the result. Instead, he had charmed her, seduced her to get out. Playing tricks on people like us never ended with a positive outcome, they should have known that, you couldn´t manipulate a master liar. 

I felt a curious thing flicker in my chest for a second before it fizzled out but I paid it no mind, I wasn´t interested in it.

“I never asked you if you wanted kids”, I thought randomly after a long stretch of silence during which he had started playing with my hair like he always did. He was hyperactive and so he always had to be doing something, early in our partnership I had told him to play with my hair instead of tapping his foot or clicking his tongue as those habits made it impossible for me to focus. He hadn´t lost that habit and I couldn´t say I hadn´t missed it during the time we´d been apart. 

He raised his eyebrows to convey curiosity and I explained myself. “I always assumed the answer would be no because they would be a burden and a liability. Was I wrong? I know Harley is on the pill but she´s still young, she could still have your children. I´m sure she´d be eager to, in fact”.

“I didn´t know you and Harley had got so close that you´d discuss contraception methods”.

“You and I talked about my period and my aversion to having kids pretty early on”, I reminded him. “We weren´t particularly close back then, in fact I thought you were kind of a dick, I still think that actually”.

“Your nurturing and loving nature balances my dickishness”, he smirks and I smile back with a low chuckle.

“You are too selfish to relinquish even a fraction of your pleasure so I assume you do not use a condom but seeing the regularity of your encounters with that shrieking banshee, I concluded that she had to be using something and the pill is the most comfortable method”. I exhibited a proud smile, licking my lips. “Am I wrong?”

“Completely, you are losing your touch”, he squeezed my hip and I groaned. “Why would I ever want to have kids with her?” he scoffed, answering my original question. “They are noisy and demand attention all the time”.

“So like you, you mean”, that earned my thigh a squeeze hard enough to bruise the skin.

“And her kids would still be half of her, I don´t want any more of her running around, she´s vexing enough as it is”.

“And with anyone other than Harley?”

“Are you volunteering?” he bucked his hips and almost threw me off him and I held on to the aviator jacket in order not to end up on the floor. “I´m sure your mother would be thrilled that you´re finally doing your duty as a Rinaldi, you got to keep the family line going and all that”.

“You´re having entirely too much fun with this”, I declare.

“The kids would have your hair and my handsome looks and we could take them on heists, show them the ropes so to speak and if they turned out to be uninteresting or you know, emotional”, he grimaced at the word and shuddered, “we could donate them or something”.

“Yeah, or something. I´m going to assume this is the blood loss speaking and I´m going to bed before you start coming up with names for kids that are never going to exist”. I drew that point in by sticking my finger into his chest and then stood up gingerly so I wouldn´t brush my legs against his wound.

He had placed the plastic bags on the only bedroom in the cabin that had a king-sized bed with a rose coverlet which made me wrinkle my nose as soon as I saw it. I placed the wig I´d taken off as soon as we entered the house on my nightstand and then took off my boots and stacked them at the foot of the bed. I then carefully remved the color contacts as well and sighed, blinking rapidly. I then inspected the contents of my bag and found a long silver nightgown that had glitter on some parts of it. When I put it on and looked at myself on the mirror of the room, I looked like a goddam fairy with snowy white hair and a glittering long dress. I shook my head, knowing full well he had done that on purpose.

I wasn´t surprised when I found a small stash of period products inside a smaller bag. That man kept track of my menstruation cycle better than I did at times so after sticking two night pads to my underwear, I went to the bathroom and brushed my hair to get it rid of some of the dust it had accumulated when the wall of the bank had come down. I smiled at my image thinking of the shot I´d fired at the she clown, pity I hadn´t been aiming at her heart, God how I despised her. 

When I went back to the bedroom, the Joker was already under the sheets, the coverlet thrown messily on the floor. I got in bed as well and fell asleep as soon as y head touched the pillow, my body desperately in need of rest.

I woke up three hours later when my bedmate kicked my shin and I howled, waking up brusquely from my slumber. I kicked him back and turned over to direct my angry glare at him and that´s when I noticed that he was having one of his nightmares and he was kicking, fists flying around wrinkling the sheets as he fought an invisible enemy. 

“Get away!” he panted, anger scrunching his face. “I don´t want another shot! Leave me alone!”

I ducked, pressing myself to the mattress when one of his fists almost broke my nose. As I got up to go to the kitchen I surmised he was reliving an episode at Arkham, maybe fighting against the nurses or the guards. I could still hear him moving around as I filled a glass with water so I ran back to the bedroom and had the enormous pleasure of drenching him in cold water like he had done to me years ago. 

He woke up gasping, mouth open like a fish as I stood there feeling proud of myself for having got the opportunity to get back at him for that one. He was looking at me intently, his eyes still clouded but his body was taut like a wire and I recognized the expression on his face, he was trying to decide whether I was real or not. The dream must have really shaken him up if he was doubting if I was there at all or if I was just a figment of his tormented psyche.

Being condescending with him and sitting beside him trying to reassure him that I was actually there would probably end up with me pinned to the wall with one of his blades in my chest so I stood there, a cautionary distance between the two of us. He didn´t need me to baby him and I wouldn´t do it even if he did so I decided to lift the sleeves of my nightgown to my elbows so he could see the scars on my arms, scars that hadn´t been there before he went to Arkham. Maybe they would convince him that I was real.

His hand slithered out fast as a snake and he grasped my forearm in his bony but deceptively strong fingers. He pulled me towards him and did a thorough inspection of my cuts. Paying far more attention to them than anyone else had in the past. My family had seen them as their own failure to keep me happy and so they had avoided looking at them and the doctors and nurses had only cleaned and bandaged them but they had been a foregone conclusion so they hadn´t really sparked an outrageous reaction, it had been something they had all expected.

He, on the other hand, ran his calloused fingertips over the raised skin that was either a white discolored hue or more pinkish in tone. He took his time, going over all of them, even the ones on my wrists which made a shudder go up my spine as it brought so many memories back. As he carried out this task, his breathing slowed down, his chest stopped bobbing up and down so fast and his muscles weren´t so tense by the time he had finished with both my arms. His eyes didn´t look lost and glazed over anymore so I felt safer sitting down on the bed. May nudged my leg, worried about his outburst but I shushed her and she returned to her place at the foot of the bed, her dark eyes looking at us.

“You were having a bad dream”, I informed him when he turned his sight to his damp shirt that was glued to his emaciated body which had become even thinner due to his stay at Arkham. His green hair was now plastered to his forehead and I ran my hand over it trying to make it look better. “You wouldn´t let me sleep”.

“Makes for a change”, he replied running a hand through his soaked hair, undoing my work.

“You´re much too thin”, I commented reprovingly, looking at his collarbones poking out of his skin, at his ribs sticking out of his body.

“Well, I didn´t have you to cook for me these past six years now, did I?”

“Was the food bad at Arkham?” We´d never discussed his time at the asylum and I wasn´t too sure it was a sensible idea to bring it up after he had just had a nightmare about it but I really wanted to know what those six years apart had been like for him. If he had seen me like I had seen him, heard my voice like I had heard his, lose his head like I had lost mine.

“Everything tasted like nothing”. How eloquent.

“And you don´t eat too much to begin with”, I added. It wasn´t like I was one to judge as I too had lost a considerable amount of weight.

I´d dragged some of my life with him to my sham of a life with my family. My sleep patterns had been off as I had spent so many nights up with him planning and whatnot and my eating habits had also changed because he didn´t eat much and I had grown accustomed to eating very little and not regularly. Cooking had been a big no no for me as well, for years I had blatantly refused to cook at my house even though I knew how to do it because mother always made sure to remind me how a dutiful wife cooks for her husband and so I had put my foot down and hadn´t cooked until I had been kidnapped. 

Going back to my old life had been jarring enough but I hadn´t been able to even come near the kitchen as it would remind me of our meals and me cooking for him and his meatballs. It brought all kinds of flashbacks so I stayed away from it and in Amsterdam Rudy had been the one who had cooked for us so that particular problem had been solved. It had been six years since I had even fried an egg but now being back with him, I´d ventured into the kitchen once more and had even made meals like I had never stopped in the first place.

Each day I spent with him I felt closer to my older self and further apart from the weakened and pathetic version I´d been when he hadn´t been around and it felt good becoming reacquainted with Elsa Rinaldi, it felt so damn good. A pang I recognized made itself known in my stomach and I knew it was happiness. And with that feeling came along one of certain protectiveness towards the man sitting before me, he had brought me back from the gray and I didn´t want to lose him because he wouldn´t eat enough. I only had this feeling with a very small number of people and it felt foreign but not bad so I allowed it.

“Weren´t your doctors worried about your health?” I asked him.

“I think they were actually betting on when I´d die”, he smirks cruelly.

“I feel like my doctors did the same thing but not for a lack of caring, they just gave up on me and I understand why they did”, I murmured looking at my arms.

“But then there was the one and only Dr. Harleen Quinzel”, he said, inching closer to me.

“Oh, do tell me”, I encouraged him.

“Well, you know her. White hair, long legs, good rack”. I scrunched my nose. “Pretty smart too, the whole package really, she kind of reminded me of you with all her daddy issues”.

“I don´t have daddy issues”, I complained, kicking him but he caught my leg and wouldn´t let go so I resigned myself to waiting for him to get tired of tracing patterns on my skin.

“Sure you do, daddy, mommy and sibling issues. The whole shebang, you have family issues that pop up at the strangest of moments and that are actually quite endearing”. All the tenderness from his last comment vanished when he wiggled his eyebrows in a suggestive manner even if I knew he was just laughing at me.

“You have issues as well”, I replied. “And don´t get me started on them”.

“I don´t deny it little one. Anyway, easy to manipulate, open as a book when you know where to read and what buttons to press. Had her wrapped around my finger from pretty much the first session. She was so enthusiastic, the greatest criminal of the bunch was only answering to her. Our therapy sessions quickly turned into something completely different. I asked her about herself and she was only too happy to comply… you know the rest”.

“You speak so flippantly of her, even let her get captured by the cops and then by my family yet you made her what she is, corrupted her if you please. Some would even say you have feelings for her and you´re certainly feeding the rumor fill by defiling her almost every night”.

“Is that jealousy I detect in your voice, princess?” He teased me, his hands crawling up all the way to my scarred knee, riding up the nightgown´s hem with his fingers and stopping to survey the damaged area. I tried to cover it back up but he tskd at me and followed each of the crisscrossing scars with his cold digits, making me shiver. “Is this why you have a limp? Why you can´t hop onto the van like before?” he inquired.

“No, that´s because a bastard with green hair decided it would be fun to shatter my patella”, I replied venomously with a nasty glare in his direction. Seeing as his dark mad eyes were still fixed on my face, I added. “They had to do a lot of reconstructive surgery after you smashed my knee, hand and thigh. Both the leg injuries combined and the titanium screws I have inside my bones keeping them together are what make me walk funny”.

Few things made me self-conscious and I was willing to bet that my limp and my useless hand were the only things that made me doubt my own strength as they had been a hindrance to me for so long. My scars didn´t affect me but they had upset my family so I had covered them for years but what really affected me where the physical handicaps I had as a result of my own cowardice. Those I could not stand to look so now my gaze was focused on the rumpled sheets and not his wandering fingers.

“I like your new way of walking”, his confession shattered my thoughts. I never thought I´d hear him praise something that hindered my physical skills, something that could potentially damage our operations.

“I haven´t let anybody see my legs in six years”, I whispered so fast I doubted he had even understood my rushed murmur but he hummed and I knew he had caught it. He understood too what it meant that I was letting him explore my legs at his leisure.

The two of us stayed quiet for a while as everything sank in. In order to put an end to our “moment”, he flipped me over so that I was resting on my left side, my right leg exposed, scar included. He followed it reverently with his eyes at first but then he got bolder and trailed it with his fingertips, causing goose bumps to spread all over my thigh. The hem of my nightgown kept riding up as he kept inching upwards toward the place where the scar began, by my hipbone.

His tongue was moving inside his cheeks, tracing his own scars and I wondered if he noticed that gesture or if it was completely involuntary. It was another of his mannerisms I´d adopted during our time separated to feel him closer to me. Then, he leaned down until his lips were pressed against the skin of my thigh and he went all the way up again, skimming my skin with his scarred lips. The warm pang inside my chest making itself known more prominently, now it resembled a small inferno spreading fast through my body.

I was aware of the fact that my breathing pattern was not undisturbed and that my blood was congregating in my cheeks so I thanked the darkness for allowing me some cover. I didn´t know if I wanted him to stop or if I´d rather he went on like this for a while. I was all too aware of what he had done to me in the past, that story was written all over my skin and yet I was allowing him to explore my body in such an intimate capacity and my body was heating up and I felt a bit dizzy from all the blood going to my head.

“This is new”, he said, dragging the elastic of my panties down a bit so he could look at the tally marks he´d cut into me and over which I´d had tattooed a simple word: survivor. 

“Are there any more?”

“No, just the one”, I answered, rearranging my clothes to which he grunted in mock disappointment and then crawled to my side on the bed.

“Suits you. Small, concise and brave, very appropriate”.

“That sounded dangerously close to a compliment”, I said, rolling over so he´d be facing my back.

“Maybe it was. Don´t let it go to your head, though”, he warned teasingly laying down beside me.

“Yeah, wouldn´t want to become like you”.

He grunted and placed his warm hand on my hip covering my marks and the newly discovered tattoo and I almost jumped at the touch. Our bodies had never come in contact before when we were sleeping together, neither of us was a fan of too much physical contact so each of us stayed on our sides of the bed. But clearly not tonight.

As it was, this turned out to be really something as for the first time in years I managed to sleep soundly for more than four hours in a row.


	18. Kids these days

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Violence and strong language

“Where´s my daughter, you bitch!” Mrs. Rinaldi backhanded me one more time and I spat blood on the concrete floor as I laughed manically, I actually found the situation hilarious.

“I don´t know but if I did she´d be dead by now”, I let her know matter-of-factly, blood dripping down my chin. “But don´t worry, I´m sure the Joker´s found her already and if he isn´t balls deep inside her, then she´s dead and he´ll come after you, scum!” I shrieked in my shrill voice.

That grabbed the attention of the father who appeared to have given up on me and was instead sat on a folding chair outside the circle of light the naked bulb above me projected.

“What do you mean?” He looked shocked as he got up, his face contracted in anxiety and rage. “Elsa told us he´d never abuse her”.

Bubbling laughter exploded out of me and my body was wracked with tremor because of how hard I was laughing despite the piercing pain in my shoulder and my cheeks. Blood sprayed Elsa´s father´s shoes and that sent me on another fit of laughter.

“She´s really got you all wrapped around her little finger, huh?” I commented looking straight into his dark brown eyes with a predatory smile. “Little Elsa, what a minx”.

“Don´t you dare talk about my daughter like that!” The mother stepped forward to hit me one more time but her husband caught her raised arm and looked her in the eye, willing her to let me talk.

And so I did, gladly, I didn´t owe that bitch shit. “Who said there wouldn´t be consent?” Their faces paled. “Those two just need to get it out of the way so they can finally get over each other and then he´ll kill her for good!”

“My daughter´s not in love with that psycho!” the woman roared.

“Who said anything about love? Kids these days, they never listen, do they?” I shook my head and turned to Mr. Rinaldi. “They have unfinished business to take care of and when he finally fucks her dry and puts a bullet through her head, then he´ll come back for me”.

He made sure to turn his ring inwards so the slap he gave me would have an extra sting, courtesy of the small diamond embedded in the band. But I didn´t care, not about the gash on my cheek or the one on my forehead or even the cuts on my arms and legs. Mr. Jay had done much worse to me and at that minute, he was probably doing exactly that to Elsa who had surely crumbled under his torture, crying and begging for her live desperately but not me. Oh, no, I was much stronger than that midget and I´d break free of these damn bonds and shoot the whole family down, spare my lover the time and effort.

I´d woken up in this chair under harsh lighting to three family members bombarding me with questions about their pretentious brat. I´d told them all that I knew, I didn´t owe her anything. I´d told them about the robbery and about how she´s run away with an outsider to the Joker´s crew after killing the clown´s men and shooting me. A recent Wound the Rinaldi´s had made sure to exploit when they didn´t like the answers I had to give them about their precious lying daughter that had them fooled into thinking she was actually innocent. It looked like she´d brainwashed them, all of them believed she was being held against her will, chained to a radiator and allowed a single meal a day consisting on rancid bread and soup or something along those lines. 

They hadn´t believed me when I had told them the Joker was treating their daughter quite nicely for his standards, far better than me, and they had refused to listen to how she had friends among his crew. 

“I think she´s telling the truth about the robbery”, the brother´s voice boomed from the back of the room all of a sudden. “This psycho is obviously in love with the Joker, she´d have no reason to lie about someone she so clearly despises and competes against for the clown´s attention. Plus, the news reports and the hostages at the bank did say that two robbers got away, it matches her story”.

“So you think your baby sister is in love with a madman”, the mother deadpanned, disgusted.

“No, I believe that´s part of her own paranoia, she does seem quite unhinged after all and you´d have to be to stay with the Joker”. I snarled at the kid, showing him my teeth. “But I do think Elsa is out there, running for her life, trying to escape the Joker while we´re here wasting time”.

“I´m not paranoid!” I complained. “Who told you that?”


	19. Blood and whiskey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You are getting a treat! A less controlled and cool Elsa!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Blood and self-harm

The last time I´d tried to escape, I´d had it all perfectly planned. I was going to hide in one of the trunks of the multiple cars we had at the lair and then wait for someone to notice my absence. The Joker, when he came back from the job, would send his men after me and luckily, someone would take the car I was in inadvertedly sneaking me out like a smuggled good and I´d finally be free. I´d have to ditch the car and the passengers within somehow but the hardest part which was getting out of the warehouse would have been accomplished so from there on it would be child´s play to return to the mansion.

It was probably one of the worst formulated plans I had ever devised, I was aware of this as it was far from airtight. I was counting on no one searching the cars and on jumping out of a moving car and not breaking anything. It was so bad it represented how little I wanted to actually leave him, I felt good there, too good. I didn´t like feeling dependent on someone, it made me feel weak and unsafe because it had always been me out for myself and that was still the case because I knew the Joker wouldn´t move a finger to help me if something were to happen to me but I had grown used to having him around. I had even memorized his habits and his speaking patterns and the feel of my hand on his face and I felt uneasy about that because that had never happened to me before and I didn´t know what it was but I knew I wanted it gone. Hence, my poor plan.

At the time, I´d been with him for more than four months, almost five actually, enough to learn about his quirks and preferences when it came to food, I´d drawn him so often I didn´t need him anymore, I could do it from memory. And I´d done all that because I wanted to, not because I had to put on a façade or I was gathering intelligence about him to use it against him to get what I wanted. The process had gone unnoticed to me until two weeks ago I had drawn his face entirely from memory, my hand so accustomed to sketching his sharp features that it had almost moved of its own accord.

I had examined my drawings and seen that almost all of them were of him from different angles and using different shadows and lighting ant it had got to me how detailed they were and how he hadn´t been with me half the time I´d been working on them.

He´d even taken me on a substantial amount of jobs and meetings and I´d thoroughly enjoyed that. That he valued my opinion meant something to me as did the fact that he wanted me by his side when cracking a bank´s safe open or handling hostages. 

The truth of the matter was that I was still alive because he hadn´t noticed this yet, he hadn´t reached the conclusions I had. We had become a liability to each other, somewhat, and that meant one of us had to go for things to be the way they were before when he didn´t search for me to go on jobs and I didn´t paint him using muscle memory. I was only alive because I had realized this sooner and so now I needed to go before he too understood what this meant. It wasn´t love, people like us weren´t built for that, but it was a companionship that could take a dangerous turn and I didn’t want my life to end because of it so I would extricate myself from the whole operation and go back to my old unfulfilling live.

The only thing on my mind at the moment was the possible retaliation, after all, the Joker had been getting a hefty cut of my father´s operations by having me there with him. What if he tried to go after me again? Or killed my family? I didn´t care much about that second possibility but it could become a nuisance because social services would have to get involved seeing as I was underage. 

I´d been absorbed in my thoughts so I hadn´t noticed the thumping steps coming up the steps and then barging into my room where I´d been waiting for the right time to hide in one of the cars. I turned around, startled and gasped when I saw a blood covered Frost opening the double doors to our quarters.

“What´s wrong? Where is he?” I knew If Frost was hurt he wouldn´t come into our room but go to Doc, so that meant the one that was actually bleeding so much was the clown. He stared at me, shocked as well. He was distraught and preoccupied but before he had time to answer me, two more men came inside carrying the Joker between the two of them. 

They had blood on their shirts too but I didn´t pay attention to them as I rushed to the bed where they were lowering the Joker on. His blood was already soaking the sheets as well as his shirt that was white no more. His eyes were closed and he was sweating profusely, his face paint in disarray and his body caked in blood and grime. There was an entry wound on his chest so close to his heart my knees faltered and I almost fell.

“No!” I shouted and I was both shocked and surprised to see that a single tear was falling down my face. I wiped it immediately and tried to grasp one of his hands but my shout had woken him up and he ordered Frost to get me out of the room.

Seeing as the henchman was paralyzed and so was I, he barked again. “Now Frost!”

He had to drag me out of the room as I fought against him with everything I had, screaming my lungs out and scratching at his face. I myself was shocked at my raw reaction but it felt as if something had stabbed me in the chest and I was breathing rapidly, my heart thrumming in my chest. He didn´t get to usher me away like I was nothing more than the dust on his shiny shoes. Oh no, he didn´t get to shoo me away whenn I had lasted more than half of his men, when I had been sleeping on the floor for months and had got through his temper tantrums. Rage boiled inside me, something angry and dark I hadn´t felt before, not in that capacity and I screamed profanities at the closed door as Frost dragged me away.

He took me to his room as the men were starting to gather on the floor below trying to see what all the ruckus was about. I´d seen Doc go in but the doors had shut immediately after he stepped into my room so that was all I knew. Offhandedly, I thought this would have been the perfect moment to run away amidst all the confusion but the mere thought of it made me nauseous and so I resigned myself to allow Frost to carry me. 

He cleaned himself in his bathroom while I accosted him with questions about what had happened. He was in the middle of his story when a shot rang out and I got up, running out of the room to get to my door but Frost got there first. Damn his longer legs.

“Bullet must´ve come out”, he explained like this was not the first time it had happened.

“He shot Doc?” I asked, wringing my hands, something I had never ever done before I my life either.

“No. Probably one of the men holding him down or the one who took too long to bring him his whiskey. He loves to drink when something like this happens. Drives Doc crazy because he won´t take any painkillers”. Something in my face must have given away the storm I was swept in because he put a calming hand on my shoulder to reassure me. “Don´t worry princess, he´ll outlive us all”.

“I figured he´d been shot before”. I muttered. “Comes with the job, I guess. But had he ever been shot in the chest?” Frost shook his head. “Yeah, that´s what I thought”, I said darkly.

It turned out they had been ambushed in the middle of a deal and some of the men had been killed outright by snipers on rooftops as they scattered to try to get back to the cars, the Joker had been hit then too. Frost didn´t know who had betrayed them or if it had been my dad´s men but either way there would be hell to pay.

Word would get out on the street that the Clown Prince of Crime had been shot, possibly even killed and all the other riff-raff would be all too eager to claim back the territory we had taken from them. The most cautious ones would wait until they knew for sure whether he was dead or alive but either way it would be a bloodbath. And if he… when he pulled through, he´d go after those who had dared hurt him or betray him when he had been down. A massacre of epic proportions. And a part of me wished for it to happen because it would mean he was alive and well and people would see who really ran Gotham´s criminal underworld and the whole city would tremble.

“What can I do?” I asked Frost who was watching me fidget due to all the nervous angry energy.

“I´m going to back in there to see how he´s doing. You can wait outside and we´ll go from there. He probably just didn´t want to freak you out with the gory part of the recovery”.

“I´ve been helping Doc patch you guys up for months, I´ve seen my fair share of gore and bullet wounds. He just didn´t want me there with him”, and damn him if it didn´t sting. 

I hoped I didn´t sound as defeated as I felt, I didn´t like this rush of heady emotions, I wanted them out. Now.

“Don´t fret, he´ll come around. You know how he is”.

“Exactly”, I deadpanned.

Frost gave me one last worried look as he squeezed my shoulder but then he turned his back to me and closed the door to my own room leaving me alone on the platform with all the men looking at me from the ground floor. He left me alone with all this nervous energy that made my skin writhe, left me alone with my ire and my confusion.

“Is the boss okay?” asked one of the men and I punched the wall, feeling more in control when the plaster broke and bruised my knuckles. My fingers were bleeding but I felt marginally better and so I answered that I didn´t know.

“He´ll be okay, don´t you worry miss”, said one of the shortest henchmen.

“I´m not worried”, I faked a smile.

Just then a big burly man ran past me carrying a bottle of amber liquor and swiftly entered my room. I hadn´t even been able to catch a glimpse of the bed and I bit my lips until they bled. I locked myself in Frost´s room to pace back and forth as I scratched my chest where a ball of resentment and something that alarmingly looked a lot like worry was forming. I didn´t like this, I hated it, in fact. I didn´t want it in me, I needed it out but no matter how much I scratched and how much blood stained my shirt, I still couldn´t get rid of that dire sensation I had never felt before. 

I groaned and threw the knives I had at the wall and then picked them up and threw them again one after the other and I kept scratching at my chest and neck and yanking on my hair and shouting with Frost´s pillow muffling my noises. I kept pacing back and forth and balancing on my tip toes and punching walls and just about driving myself crazy. All the while, that ball inside my chest kept growing and growing and I felt disoriented and crazed and hurt and confused and I just didn´t want to be able to feel any of those emotions. Where was my calm, collected self and why had she taken a vacation? I tried to turn it off, to switch off those pesky things that were driving me up the wall but every time I heard the door to my room open and close and hurried steps that brought more whisky I just began my vicious circle all over again. 

I didn´t know what to do and I did not feel like wrecking Frost´s room so I stepped outside to the small hallway that connected our rooms at the end of which were the stairs and I started pacing that small stretch of hallway and then I sat with my back against the wall but I couldn´t stay put for a long time so I got up again and resumed my pacing.  
One time Frost came out to see how I was doing and he looked me up and down and tried to reassure me that the worst was over but I turned my back on him and continued my nervous pacing at the same time I scratched my arm to control that nervous itch that was all over my body, under my skin. He must´ve warned Doc of what was going on with me because he came out of the room half an hour later covered in blood and found me puking my guts out on Frost´s bathroom.

“Kid…”he kneeled by my side with his kind smile which I found repulsive just then.

“Go away!” I shouted. “Go back to him!” Seeing as he was doubtful I pushed him away. “Go!”

Frost found me in his bathroom hugging my knees and making a mess of my thighs. He sat in front of me and got a hold of my wrists so I would stop hurting myself.

“Don´t you think you´ve done enough?” he asked me, surveying the damage.

“I just want it out”, my voice sounded weak and tired and I hated myself for it. “I don´t want it”. He seemed to understand but how could he not when he had practically lived with the Joker for years although I was willing to bet he had never seen him unravel. “How is he?”

“Conscious still but with all the whisky he´s drinking he´ll be out before long. He´s lost a lot of blood, though, he´ll need rest and God knows he won´t like that”.

“Do we have blood for him?”

“We don´t know what his blood type is”.

“I´m O negative, I can give him some of mine if Doc has the necessary equipment”, I got up with a renewed sense of purpose.

“I don´t think…”

I walked out of his room, intercepting the latest delivery of an alcoholic bottle. I took the whisky from the hands of an unsuspecting henchman and I shooed him with my other hand. He gulped and then ran down the stairs. I started stomping as I paced once again but this time limiting my area to the bedroom door to make sure he would hear me.

“Someone shoot her!” his voice bellowed from the inside of the room and despite myself, I smiled at how he had known it was me.

“This is not a good idea Elsa”, Frost tried to warn me but I shushed him. “I´ll go get the tools”, he sighed going downstairs to Doc´s nursery. He knew I would not be deterred.

“Why don´t you come out and do it yourself?” I goaded him, happy to see I could get on his nerves too.

“You, little-

“Stay still or the wound will reopen!” Doc protested. “Too late. Go ahead and bleed to death”, his voice had a curious mix of fondness and irritation. “Honestly, you two”.

“She started it!” 

“How mature of you to point fingers!” I screamed from the other side of the door.

“I´m going to do more than point fingers if you don´t stop pacing, woman”, he threatened me and I had to contain my mirth, I decidedly liked a drunk Joker, much more than a hurt one. That thought sobered me up.

“Where´s my whiskey?” he questioned his men just as Frost appeared at the top of the stairs with plastic tubes, bags and needles in his hands.

“I have it”, I answered him.

“Frost, take it from her”, he commanded his right hand man.

“Boss, she is willing to donate you her blood, I´d be a bit more thankful”.

“I don´t want her blood! I want my whiskey!”

“Come get it, then!” I goaded him.

“Don´t think that I won´t you impertinent brat!” he screamed back and I laughed uproariously just to irritate him.

“Gun!” Doc warned us before a bullet opened a hole on the door right where my head had been a second before.

“That´s enough! I´ve had it with you!” I hollered, getting up and barging in on my window turned improvised hospital. “This is my room too!”

“Technically it isn´t, I just let you sleep on the floor”, the bedridden man smirked as Doc rolled his eyes and tried to contain the hemorrhage. He looked pale and sweaty and some of his paint was cracked and streaked with sweat and blood, his top half naked with a soaked bandage covering his chest, all of his tattoos and ribs in display. 

“And I allow you to sleep on the bed because I know how much you like to think you have control over me even though it´s clear who runs this show”, I retort.

I didn´t like how my stomach was contracting with something akin to worry seeing him in that state, I didn´t like that I had bitten off at least six fingernails or the fact that my chest and neck looked like a bloody warzone due to all the scratches. To top it all off my head looked like a veritable bird´s nest, all in disarray due to all the pulling and yanking I´d subjected it to and he was fast to comment on that.

“I may be the one who´s been shot but you look like shit”, he drawled out with a lazy smile, his eyes drinking me in.

“You are one to talk”, I spat. “My grandma looked better than you in her funeral and it was a closed casket one”.

“I think we found the lion that escaped from the zoo”, he jested arrogantly. “Do you know what a comb is, woman?”

“At least I can look nice when I want to, you couldn´t even if you tried. In fact, I´m going as far as to say this is the best you´ve looked since we met and you resemble a molted popsicle”.

“You look like you just escaped from Arkham and the car you were in caught on fire and the explosion did that to your hair. I bet I could light up the whole city up just by getting  
your hair close to the main generator. You don´t need static electricity, you are its embodiment”.

“Well, you-

“Shut up the both of you!” Doc brought an end to our battle of wits and it was then that I remembered that we weren´t alone in the room and that we´d been venting our frustration in front of a group of henchmen who by the looks of it had enjoyed it thoroughly. “Now, if Elsa volunteered then I will draw her blood and then I´ll leave you for the night”. The Joker grumbled something in response that probably wasn´t a thanks for my contribution. “I assume you´re 0 negative, right?” I nodded. “Great, sit down, please”.

The only available seats where the one in front of the boudoir and the chair the Joker always used to plan his jobs and sitting in the latter felt wrong without him with me so I settled on the former and extended my arm.

“Geez, kid”, Doc exclaimed when he saw the scratches. “That´s a real art expression you´ve got going on there”.

I smiled in appreciation for not making a worried comment about it and then I didn´t flinch when he inserted the thicker than normal needle attached to a tube and then to a bag that started filling up with my blood. I kept the whisky bottle gripped in my other hand the whole time narrowing my eyes at the Joker as he responded in kind. When we were finished, Doc offered me some cotton to dab on the bloody prick in my skin and then hooked the Joker up to the bag.

“You should be good for the night”, the old man stated looking pointedly at his boss as if daring him to make any brusque movement that would rip open the stitches again. “I´m counting on you to tell me if something is wrong because he won´t tell me if he´s in pain”, he said that looking at me. “Now, his temperature will go up a bit more than normal so don´t worry about that but if you think he is too hot then call me or if you detect anything out of the ordinary”.

“I´m out of the ordinary”, the patient grumbled, disgruntled and Doc shook his head.

“I trust you to look out for him and call me if something happens. Agreed?” he squeezed my arm with a fond smile and I nodded my head not taking my eyes off the clown, savoring how I was in charge of him for once.

“Don´t worry Doc, he´s in good hands”, I assured him.

“No, I´m not. She´s going to kill me as soon as you go”.

“Serves you well. You almost blew my head off, jackass”.

“But I didn´t, did I?” The men snickered at that before wishing me luck for the night and exiting the room. Doc game my arm one last squeeze and Frost winked at me.

As soon as we were alone, he asked for the bottle back and I shook my head.

“Not until we talk”.

“I´m definitely going to need to be drunk for that”, he murmured.

“This is for ordering Frost to cart me outside”, I said hitting his right shoulder. “And this is for not letting me come in here for hours”, another hit. “This is for making me worry”, a new hit. “And this is for shooting me”, he rolled his eyes as I hit him once more. “This is for you being insufferable and this one is because I feel like it”, I hit him twice more and by the time I finished both his skin and my hand were red.

“You´re lucky I´m not in the mood to get back at you right now but trust me, I will”.

“Oh, I´m looking forward to it”. He made a move to get the bottle from me but I held it away. “We need to talk first. I´m mad at you, you know”.

“What´s new”, he sighed in frustration, rolling his eyes like a toddler. “Women are always mad, more often than not for no reason at all”.

“Bras and heels, that´s the reason. And you know, sexual harassment and male chauvinism and lower income for the same job… you know, those kinds of things”.

“God only knows what you would do if you wore heels then if this is your standard way of behaving”, he raised his eyebrows mockingly and I stuck my tongue out like a mature adult.

“Why did you send me away?” I asked him earnestly, sitting down next to him on the bed, assessing the state of his bandages and the blood bag but subtly because he didn´t appreciate anyone looking too much at him when he was not at his best.

“You were hysteric. You would have driven everyone crazy with your squealing and crying and I couldn´t afford that at that moment”.

“I most definitely do not squeal”, I drove my point in by tapping on his chest with my finger. “And I sure as hell was not in hysterics. I may have reacted a bit strongly at first but it was out of shock. I would have behaved myself, I´ve been helping Doc for quite some time and I´ve seen bullet wounds before, I could have helped”. I repeated what I had said to Frost before.

“That may be so but you had never seen me getting shot before”, he pointed out.

“I don´t see what difference it makes, you or your men, you´re all just pieces of meat at the end of the day. It doesn´t make a difference, not to me, you know that”, I tapped my temple with my finger.

“Is that so sweetheart? Because I don´t think you handled it very well”. Now it was his turn to tap my chest, neck and arms with a knowing expression on his face.

I went to retort immediately but I knew he was partially right, I hadn´t exactly kept a cool head all throughout the ordeal and that showed on the blood on my shirt and skin. I remembered the anxiety and adrenaline coursing through my veins as I drew myself up the wall. It had never happened before and I didn´t like it, didn´t like how powerless it had made me feel. How fragile I had felt knowing that if he died then I wouldn´t be able to stay cool and undetached, that I might hurt for the first time in my life. Was this how it felt to be attached to someone? Because I would give anything to have it taken away from me, I didn´t appreciate the nauseous feeling or the worry or the sinking feeling. I wasn´t made for that kinds of things, I didn´t know how to handle them, how to harness them to obtain the outcome I wanted. It was odious.

“I thought you were going to die”, I whispered after a long while, not looking at him as I confessed that and out of the blue a tear traveled down my cheek and I batted it away immediately. “I thought you were going to die and you sent me outside!” My voice grew a bit in volume. “Outside where I could not see what was happening or how you were doing”. He huffed and I would have too but I needed to let it all out so I would stop feeling sentimental, it was not becoming. Most of all I felt rage, though, rage because he had shut me out. It didn´t matter that I had been planning to escape, that I was going to leave him behind. I could shut him out, not the other way around. He had shaken the ground under my feet and I certainly did not appreciate that loss of control. 

I hit him once more just because I could and because I needed to get rid of all the rage building up inside me. Oh, how I hated him at that moment.

“Geez, ever thought about being a nurse? You´ve got the kind bedside manner down to a T”, he wheezed.

“Shut up”, I cracked a smile and then I gave him the bottle which he eagerly took from my hands and downed almost in one go. “Impressive”.

“I´ve got a lot of talents, little one. It´s not all exploding buildings and kidnapping infuriating youngsters”.

“Keep telling yourself that”.

I chuckled when he reached out for me, probably to smack me but I tiptoed to the ensuite bathroom to brush my hair diligently and splash cold water on my face. I checked the scratches and then bandaged them after dabbing some alcohol on them. Then I changed into my pajamas feeling better and calmer and preparing myself for a long night because I knew I wouldn´t be able to sleep. That nagging protection instinct would keep me up all night to report all the changes in his body, I just knew it.

When I stepped back into the room he was snoring loudly, whisky bottle laying on his flat stomach and limbs spread out like a starfish which made my lips curl up in a smirk. I got the boudoir´s chair and placed it next to the bed and took his wrist in my hand so I could monitor his pulse at all times. Taking advantage of the fact that he was passed out, I combed through his green hair with my fingers, marveling at how soft it actually was, I had always thought it would be ruined by the hair dye he applied so often.

“Don´t push your luck”, he admonished me groggily opening one eye to look at me.

“Go back to sleep”, I shushed him and he made a grimace with his scarred lips but for once, obeyed me and closed his eye.


	20. Free from the gilded cage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it´s short! Still part of the flashbacks, in case you´re confused.

“You need to get some rest”, Doc told me sternly two days later.

He had made that comment before but this was the first time I really registered it. I had spent two whole days by his bed holding his hand, I had memorized the lines of his face and his starved body and it occurred to me that I would be able to tell his wrist apart from any other because I had been holding it for so long, my fingers over his veins to monitor his pulse which was slow but not dangerously so. “He´s doing alright and being in this state is pretty standard for him after a big injury. You´ve been in the same position for forty-eight hours and he´ll probably wake up in a day or so, you don´t have to worry about him now, he´s out of danger”.

I bristled at the word worry. I wasn´t worried, I just…. I just… didn´t want him to die now. That was all, I had had five months with him and I liked him well enough to not want him to die on my watch. Simple as that.

“Go to my room, Elsa”, prompted Frost. “You look dreadful”.

“Glad to see your charm´s intact”, I retorted and he shook his head with a smile. “I´m okay, I can stay here until he wakes. But the sheets need cleaning, we´ll have to wash them and I need to change his bandages, and could someone bring me a cucumber sandwich?” I hadn´t realized until now how hungry I actually was. And thirsty. “Some water would be appreciated too”.

“Elsa, he´s in a kind of coma at the moment, I´ve seen this before, he will probably wake up tomorrow and he´s not in any danger at the moment. His immune system is out of this world, trust me, I´ve never seen anything like it, he´ll be okay. Tomorrow he´ll be walking around the warehouse or designing bombs and plotting things or whatever it is that he does but more importantly, he´ll want to go after the people that shot him and I need you sharp to stop him from doing anything foolish”, I smirked at that. “Quite frankly, I think you´re the only one who could sway him and he´s going to have to take it slow, ideally for a few weeks but knowing him, three days maximum. We need you rested so that the two of you can butt heads like you always do”.

“You could have been a salesman Doc, but I´m still not moving”. I didn´t want to go back to being a wreck because I didn´t know what was wrong, I refused to be weak and emotional again so I would stay put and damn the two of them and their speeches.

“Ok. That´s enough”. Frost decided and as he walked to me I knew what he was about to do.

“Don´t you dare”, I snarled at him.

“Look at you, you´re so tired you probably couldn´t hit me even if you wanted to. I´m taking you to my bed and I´m cuffing you to it if that means you´ll stay there”.

“I didn´t have you for a kinky guy, Frost”.

I tried deflecting with humor, hoping he would desist but I should have known better. As he picked me up and I fought back with everything I had, which wasn´t much because I was exhausted, I rationally knew that they were doing out of misplaced concern for my health, that they cared about me. That didn´t stop me from hating them at that moment.   
Frost had the gall to lock me inside his bedroom and I punched the wall. My hand felt empty now that I was no longer holding his delicate bony wrist and I screamed until my throat got raw and pulsed painfully. I extracted two paper clips from some files the right-hand man had on his worktable and I immediately began twisting them so I could pick the lock but I had just started messing with the door when his voice startled me.

“Even if you manage to pick it, which I´m sure you will, I´m waiting right outside to push you back in so do us both a favor and lie down”.

“You´re an infuriating asshat!” I bellowed.

I kicked the door and then threw some more punches at the wall but finally, feeling dizzy from the exertion and from my two sleepless days and wanting to get rid of the feeling of emptiness in my chest, I laid down in Frost´s bed after punching the pillow four more times to get my anger across and then I closed my eyes. I only got to register a pleased sigh as my back finally rested on a mattress for the first time in months before I fell asleep.

“What do you think is going on between those two?” Frost asked me. “I mean, I´ve never seen her like that and he… I don´t even know if he´s capable of feeling something”.

“Two days ago I would have said pretty much the same thing about Elsa. As for him, I think he was concerned in his own way for her. He didn´t want her to see him at his weakest. I think, and I can´t believe I´m saying this, I think they´re… friends”.

“Are they capable of that? I mean, I think Elsa likes us well enough and God knows I adore that feisty teenager but, it is strange to think about the Joker harboring feelings for another person”. Frost directed his icy eyes to his boss who was resting on his bed.

“I´m not saying he has feelings for her. I´m just saying that in a roundabout way, he might care if something bad were to happen to her, hell, I would have never predicted Elsa´s reaction to seeing him get shot. I don´t think he´s obsessed with her or anything remotely close to that but it´s like they balance each other out. She makes him a little more human and he brings out the side of her he has repressed for so long, they´ve built a bond, kind of”.

“But the Joker kidnapped her, isn´t this like Stockholm syndrome?”

“People who suffer from that empathize with their captor to the point they end up defending him and justifying his actions. I don´t think Elsa is capable of empathy, much less to that extent. I believe she is in her right mind, she just found common ground with the least probable person or really, thinking about it, the only person who can really understand her”. I explained.

We stayed quiet for a long while as I checked his vitals and made sure the wound was closing correctly. 

“I don´t think she wants to go back to her family”, Frost reflected after he had picked up all the empty bottles lying around the room. “Actually, she has never spoken about them, she has tried to escape, sure. But I think it is more out of a sense of self-preservation than really going back to them”.

“Think about it this way, with them she has to put on an act 24/7, that must be exhausting. She doesn´t have to do that with the clown, I think I would prefer that option too”.

“Don´t get me wrong, I like that she´s here with us but I would prefer if she actually managed to escape, she would be safer with her family”.

"People like them don´t like to play it safe old friend. They are known for being risk-takers, adrenaline-seekers. But you´ve seen them interact more than I have because you go on jobs with them. Do you actually think she would stay with her family or do you think she would come back?”

“I´ve never seen anything like this before. The two of them are completely synchronized, like they have been doing the same choreography all their lives. I remember the first times the Joker used to tell me to keep an eye on her to make sure she didn´t screw up the whole operation. Now he doesn´t tell me anything, it´s like he trusts her implicitly, at least in that regard, I´ve never seen him act like that with anyone before. And I don´t know a whole lot about her but I get the feeling she loves what she´s doing here with us, the rush of adrenaline, the planning, the jobs. I don´t think she could go back to the way things were before”.

"Yeah, that´s what I think too. He´s given her wings here, and they both know that. Maybe her family would be physically safer but I think her mind would resent it, going back to the old routines, to being back in a gilded cage after finally tasting freedom. Imagine what that must be like", I sighed, shaking my head and running a hand thorugh my hair. “Let´s just hope nobody gets hurt”, I prayed.


	21. Red lipstick

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is some tension in the chapter but what else can you expect with these two in close quarters!

“So what are we supposed to be?” I asked, entering the kitchen with just a towel covering my body while toweling my recently washed hair.

Nudity had never been a big concern for us. We were both quite partial to it, neither cared much about watching the other strip down although I would always do it while he wasn´t around. In fact, at first it was like he forgot at times that he had kidnapped someone when he would just strip naked in the bedroom and I would have to avert my eyes out of a sense of propriety than my parents had instilled in me.

I would laugh at times at how concerned everyone had been about my purity when they got me back when he hadn´t even touched me. In that regard I was more fortunate than other people who had had to deal with sex offenders but the Joker was not one of them and if he had been, I would have made sure to stab him in his sleep.  
That wasn´t to say we had seen each other naked, we hadn´t. But we had walked in on each other in the bathroom and the sky hadn´t fallen so that was that.  
He raised his eyebrow at my question, clearly confused as to what it meant as he kept eating out of his cereal bowl. He had prepared one for me too and he passed it to me.

“I did breakfast so you take care of lunch”.

“Cheeky”, I grinned. “We´ll have to go grocery shopping though”.

It was still weird for me to see him without his paint on so I focused on my meal and didn’t let my eyes wander up his attractive face.

“You do it, I have to make sure everything is going smoothly in Gotham”. And wasn´t that a strange thing to hear from him.

“Sure. I meant what backstory you made up for us when you rented the house”, I explained, resuming my previous line of questioning.

“We´re engaged. Here”. He got two wedding bands from his pocket and tossed me one while he put on the other.

“How romantic”, I said, voice dripping with sarcasm.

I was glad the ring was just a simple golden band, nothing too flashy.

“Figured that way no one would try to flirt with you and ask a lot of questions”.

“I know how to answer questions”, I munched on my cereals looking fixedly at him. “I have handled attention before, I know how to conduct myself in a flirting situation. Who says I have never had a paramour before or after you?”

“The fact that you called it “a flirting situation” is pretty telling darling”, I slapped his shoulder and I rejoiced in the smacking sound my hand made as it came into contact with his skin. “Do you really divide your life in before and after I came around?” he joked.

“Of course not. You´re not that big of a milestone for me, in fact, I had figured out we would meet sooner or later due to my family´s line of work. I would kick your ass and then be on my way”, I replied nonchalantly.

“That´s overconfidence if I´ve ever seen it”, he snorted.

“I figured you were all talk and no real action. The makeup threw me off, you look like my granny”.

“The closed casket one?” I almost chocked on my meal right then and there.

“You remember?” I was stupidly excited over that, and even more when he showed me the part of his chest where he had a patch of scar tissue close to his heart. I´d never got to see it before because we had parted ways shortly after he had been shot so I reached out and touched the raised skin with the tips of my fingers, intrigued.

“It was the first time I saw you with your hair looking like that. Of course I remember”, his voice was teasing and I smiled.

“It wasn´t that bad”, I said, brushing my hair with my fingers.

“So why are we here? How did we meet?” I kept inquiring after a long beat of silence.

“We´re taking some time away from the stress of the wedding. You were my high class escort and we fell in love-

“I was so not!” I almost spit out my breakfast again.

“Don´t worry honey, we don´t tell the common folk that story, we tell them you were an intern at my law firm who was trying to climb the career ladder by shagging her boss”.

“Like that´s so much better. Plus, no one would believe you run a law firm, not with that mop of curls”, I pointed at the wig he had thrown on the floor as soon as he had closed the door the night before. “Although I did like the secret affair vibe. Got it! You were my business school professor! A forbidden romance between a teacher and his student, people love that kind of thing!”

“You are enjoying this way too much”, he flicked my nose and nudged me to keep eating. “Change the story, if someone asks me something about business I will blow their brains out”.

“Okay, so you have no job but I fell in love with you because of your sense of humor”.

“I seem to have a lot going for me in that version of the story”, he chuckles.

“Yeah well, we can´t tell them what you do or what I do for that matter either. And by the way, I´m a rich heiress in this story”.

“You´re a rich heiress in real life too”.

“Then I´ll have no problem playing the part”.

“Your parents must be thrilled you are marrying an unemployed guy with horrible hair that doubles your age”.

“You´re not forty-two, plus people won´t know how old you really are when you go outside with that scarf covering half your face”.

“I could go out like this too”. He put his right hand over his mouth. His right hand in which I´d tattooed a grinning smile with silver grills like his.

“Stick to the scarf. Although I must say the artist outdid herself with this one”, I praised myself as I took his hand in mine and looked at it from every angle. Sleeping with his hand on my hip meant my own body was finding reasons to reach out for him now, it was like I craved his proximity now more than I ever had before. “I won´t be able to do something like that again, not using my left hand”.

“Have you tried?” Now it was his turn to take my right hand in his and squeeze my useless fingers. As usual, I felt nothing.

“I don´t really like how my drawings turn out when I use my left hand. They look nothing like they did before”.

“Maybe that´s a good thing seeing as you don´t either”.

I stopped short of telling him that what he had just said had been actually deep. I liked how he had all these different sides to him, he was never boring, always changing, never the same.

“Maybe”, I hummed non-committedly.

We both finished eating in silence and I added dog food to my mental shopping list. I left May with the Joker because she adored him and then put on a wool sweater with black pants and boots, my black wig and the contacts Doc had given us. Then I donned a coat and I retraced my steps to the store we had stopped at the night before and managed to get my shopping done without encountering nosy neighbors. I bought tacos, avocados and a vast array of healthy ingredients to fill them with as well as meat and white rice. I grabbed the dog food and some drawing supplies before I could overthink it. Maybe I could spend the afternoon at the beach and give it a go, perhaps I could sketch the view. 

I was glad no one recognized my face as I walked on the cobblestones of the small and quaint coastal village, either the town was too far away or too small to concern itself with Gotham´s affairs. I even met our old landlady, our very Christian landlady who of course had insisted on only having married couples in her house but seeing as we were about to tie the knot, she had allowed us to rent the small cabin. That explained the rings. I had assured her we had slept in different beds and almost broke out laughing at the face I imagined she would have made if she had caught us the night before.

When I returned home I fed May and checked with my “fiancé” that everything was going alright back in the city. He was already working on another explosive scheme, hunched over his papers so I took May on a walk, taking my sweet time breathing in the salted air that was so vastly different from the contaminated one in Gotham. The small town was clearly big on fishing as there were motives related with that profession everywhere my eyes could reach. From fishing nets to sea shells to fishing rods and even fish on almost every house and commercial establishment.

People approached me as I was the only stranger in town and I was forced to make small talk with them about how I was liking the small cabin and if I was enjoying their little town. I liked their musical accents but that was the most I got out of those meaningless interactions. In the end, I redirected May to the beach because I didn´t want to encounter any more curious and tiring villagers and it turned out to be a good idea because she had the day of her life chasing after disgruntled seagulls while I looked for a quiet spot to soak in the sun rays. I was doing just that when the phone the Joker had given me for emergencies started ringing in my pocket.

“If you´ve already killed someone I am not going to help you bury the body”, I informed him matter-of-factly.

“Whatever gave you that idea?” I could hear the smile in his voice and I shook my head.

“You said this was for emergencies only. What´s wrong?”

“I´m hungry”, maybe I was reading too much into it but he sounded sheepish.

“Yeah, well, and I wish I could be a redhead but I don´t call you to talk about it”.

“Red wouldn´t match your eyes. Still, I´m hungry woman, do something about it”.

“I went for a walk with May and I will return when I see fit. You are a grown man, cook something for yourself, I know you can. When we come back I´ll make lunch, you can eat a fruit in the meantime”.

“Come back here, little one! I´m warning you!”

Hanging up on him felt divine and I let out a small chuckle and then I walked along the shore because I could, feeling proud about it. When I got my fill of the sea breeze and of feeling the sand under my feet, I whistled for May to come to me and then walked back to our lovers retreat. When I entered, I was surprised to see everything was in pristine condition, nothing had been broken or set on fire so consequently, the first thing I did was to take out my butterfly knife and slide it in the space between my sleeve and my skin so I could access it when he came for me.

My predictions came true not long after I had started chopping the ingredients when I felt the cold kiss of a blade against my carotid artery and his body pressed against mine.

“You took your time”, he sneered against my cheek.

“I don´t know why you are complaining, it´s not like you keep a normal schedule when it comes to eating. I´ve seen you go for days without ingesting anything but coffee. Why the sudden rush?” I knew what it was, when I cooked he actually ate, maybe not big portions but he did eat and I was glad about that if I was honest with myself. He liked my cooking and maybe he wouldn´t say it out loud but we both knew it.

“I´m not the only one who doesn´t have a schedule when it comes to meals”, he accused me pinching my waist.

It was true my weight had dropped in the past years, in part because I had got used to eating with him which meant unscheduled meals only when I was about to drop. The other reason was I couldn´t stand eating surrounded by my family who was always watching how much or how little I ate and so eating had become an issue all by itself. I hadn´t lost enough wait to qualify as anorexic, nor was I, but my bones were a bit more prominent. 

“Oh, so you are doing this for my benefit. How nice, darling”.

“You´re not half as funny as you think you are”, he whispered threateningly into my ear as his blade drew a small drop of blood from my neck.

“And yet I´m still funnier than you, what an accomplishment, huh?”

I wasn´t a fun of the recent hostility but knew it had been a long time coming. He was a violent person by nature, not a being that I could control despite what other people thought. He was holed up here away from his operation and he was alone with me so it made sense that he would take out his anger on me but that didn´t mean I was going to allow it. I was not Harley, I would not be stepped on. I knew if he saw me doubt myself then he would attack, he was like a dog in that way, smelling wariness from miles away. He would exploit my weak points for his amusement and he was clearly restless over something. We had had a private conversation the night before, neither of us knew how to handle that, plus he had also had a nightmare which usually destabilized him so that cocktail amounted to him now pressing me against the marble counter with a knife to my throat.

That´s when I remembered something. “I got something for you at the store”. When he didn´t step down, I sighed cutting my throat with the motion. “I can´t go and get it if you don´t put the knife away”.

He remained still, so after rolling my eyes, I began turning in the small space he had left between the counter and his body and I winced as the blade cut a bloody line into my neck that was shallow so at least there was that. His eyes watched me dark and dangerous and angry and I didn´t take my eyes away from his. We both knew he couldn´t hurt me, he had promised not to for four days a month and that promise was the only thing standing between me and bruises around my neck from his hands. He was agitated, that much was clear, but I couldn´t say for sure what had triggered this, sometimes it was nothing at all. He just hated being predictable so this was him turning the tables on me.

“I´m going to get what I bought for you and you better not cut me, I´m not Harley, I don´t get a kick out of it”.

“And yet you still cut yourself for six years to remind you of me”, he countered, tongue slithering out to lick his scars.

“And yet you sabotaged you own break out to retrieve a knife that belonged to me”, I hissed back.

We could play this game for a long time. Surely ours wasn´t a history full of romance and endearing moments but there had been gestures in the past that talked of some kind of fondness, much as we refused to acknowledge them. 

I looked into his murky eyes and saw all the coiled dark chaotic energy in them waiting to be unleashed and I also saw some restraint, not much but it was there because of a promise he had made to me years ago. Was this about his face? He obviously had an issue with his face being completely bare. I had shaved him in the past and I had seen part of it without paint but never the whole thing. Was this why he had been so irritating the night before and now again? 

While it was in his character to be unbearable at times, this seemed like something deeper and I wondered if it was about me seeing his scars in the light of day without red paint on them. His paint was his signature along with his scars, it must have been jarring for him to lose all that for a whole weekend. I asked myself how much of this had been weighing on me subconsciously taking into account what I had bought for him, how in tune we actually were for me to have bought him makeup.

I raised my right hand and placed it gingerly but firmly on his, my eyes staring into his intently and after a few tense thirty seconds he finally put the knife down and I blinked in appreciation.

“It´ll just be a second. Close your eyes”.

I scurried around him and went to our room where I had left the painting supplies and the stupid gift. I searched the plastic bag until I found the small tube and then returned to the kitchen, placing myself once more between his body and the counter. As expected, his eyes weren´t closed but boring into me and I sighed.

“I´m going to touch your face”, I warned him and I saw him tense up, the knife was once more pressed to my neck and I swallowed reflexively only not in fear. “Don´t think I won´t stab you again if you don´t start cooperating now Joker. If you cut me again I´ll stick a knife in your gut and leave you here and don´t think I won´t”.

“Oh, I know you would”, he smiled without humor but the blade retracted a few inches. “And if you think I have qualms about killing you if you cross a line, think again”.

I nodded my head and he put the knife down copletely but trapped me more firmly against the counter so that it was pressing against my lower back painfully, our chests pressed together, his nose brushing my forehead.

“Careful sweetheart, you´ve been warned”. I knew what that ominous sentence meant, he had already warned me he would kill me which meant it was fair game, his first promise to me followed to a t.

“There are worse ways to go”, I resolved shrugging my shoulders as I took out the lipstick I had been hiding and uncapped it slowly so he could follow my movements with his watchful eyes.

I unscrewed the bright red lipstick and proceeded to apply it on his lips. At first he scrunched them, the contact foreign but once he relaxed, I kept coloring his lips and then also his scars messily like he did with his paint. The end result wasn´t even remotely similar to how he usually looked but I hoped it would placate him somewhat at least.

“Finished”, I breathed and he pursed his lips, examining his reflection on his blade.

He looked down at me and I met his gaze, not even a sliver of worry or fear in my countenance, and he just nodded, licked his lips again tasting the paint and then before I could stop him, took some of the raw meat I had been planning on cooking, and disappeared into the living room. I knew better than to think that meat was destined for May, especially when she was pressed against my leg whimpering in distress because she had smelled blood, my blood.

“It´s okay”, I whispered, shushing her small cries and pressing a cloth to my neck to staunch the bleeding. “I´m okay”.

She still pressed her furry head against my legs and I knelt down to her level so she could sniff me to her heart´s content and only once she was certain I was indeed okay, she calmed but still kept watch over me as I started cooking. I rewarded her with some meat and white rice.

When I finished preparing our meal, I just put it all in my plate and sat at the kitchen island where we had had breakfast and took small bites out of the delicious tacos. He didn´t make an appearance while I ate so in the end I kept the remaining food in the fridge so he could help himself to it if he became hungry later on and with a tired frustrated sigh I returned to the bedroom to get some sleep.


	22. Stay

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I´m sorry I took that long to update but I´ve been awfully busy lately, hope you like it. This is one of my favourite chapters, I hope you´ll see why and appreciate it too.  
> TW: there are references to Elsa´s "death" so there´ll be some talk about blood.

My body was heavy and I found standing up challenging so I was splayed on the floor. The meds the white coats had given me were kicking in and my whole body was so weighed down by them that I couldn´t even keep my mouth properly closed so a small trail of saliva was falling down my face. My arms were sore and strained from having spent so much time inside the straightjacket and my thoughts were slow and didn´t make much sense. 

I hadn´t seen her today, I seemed to remember that. It wasn´t a daily occurrence or anything like that, more like once a week or every two weeks but it was always nice to catch glimpses of her pale hair every now and then. Sometimes she was in the white room where they served us bland and tasteless food, hidden among those medicated idiots who could barely talk, other times I heard her voice in my sleep. At times she was present during my sessions, watching from the corner with a smirk on her face or making faces behind the back of the doctors or sighing in boredom. And there were times when I didn´t see her for long periods of time, I could never be too sure for how much because no one would tell me how long it had been since I got there but I knew it had been a while, I just knew.

More often than not however, she didn´t talk, she just stood there or looked around and when she did talk sometimes I answered and others I did not hoping she would get mad at me and start shouting or threaten to stab me or just scrunch her face in disapproval and huff. Sometimes when I did talk to her I just kept talking and talking while she sat in the corner of the room looking at me with her big blue grey eyes twirling her hair. I didn´t remember much of my ramblings but I had the feeling that if I never stopped talking then she wouldn´t disappear once more and when she did in the end, then I just killed another guard or started another fight or scared another doctor away and the game would start all over again. Only it wasn´t a very good game.

I didn´t want to close my eyes, I wanted to keep them open even if my lids weighed a ton each and my body was screaming for me to just let go of consciousness for a while. I didn´t want to go to sleep because I knew what awaited for me there, her beaten and bloody and the dusty concrete floor so far from the padded one I was lying on and from this lights that hurt my eyes and from the cold trail of saliva and the ache in my bones. 

Sometimes I believed I hadn´t done it, that it had all been a joke on her part, that she´d get up and laugh and wipe the blood away and challenge me to another fight. Other times I was keenly aware of the fact that I had killed her and I didn´t know exactly how that made me feel but I knew that I would forget the itch in my chest after breaking someone´s neck or whispering into another patient´s ear until they screamed in terror. Once I had made one of them pee themselves and my body had been shaken by raucous laughter as they dragged me away to this cell and pumped meds into my bloodstream.

Anything to get rid of the feel of the crowbar in my hands and the noises it had made as it went down on her time and again. Anything to rid myself of her screams of pain and then her gurgled breath as she choked on her own blood from a punctured lung. I had beaten up plenty of people in my lifetime, hell, I had even done it while locked up and it had never bothered me, I ignored whether I could even feel bothered about it. 

But I had never spent five months with any of them beforehand, never slept in the same room or perfected their fighting techniques or eaten out of their plate even if it annoyed them, especially because it did. I had never let them shave me daily or looked at their reflection in the mirror as I dyed my hair. Never played chess with any of them or robbed banks or attended meetings or seen them cry and laugh and be scratched by them or were surprised by any of them or… I´d done all those things ad more with her and at times I caught myself scratching my chest over the place where it itched and I didn´t like it, not one bit. I was the Joker, the King of Gotham´s underbelly, not a feeling sentient being.

“Stop thinking, you´re giving me a headache”, her voice broke through my tribulations and I felt the corners of my lips curl up but my face was too tired to actually rearrange itself into a smirk. 

I made a titanic effort to lift my neck to see her crouched in the corner of the room examining the padded cell with a faint look of disgust on her features. 

“Straightjacket, old-fashioned, I´ll give them points for that”.

I kept quiet, too tired to actually answer her and content with just feeling her close to me even if I couldn´t tell if she was really there with me. I wanted to ask her how she had sneaked into the institution and found me but my lips were too lax, and every small movement brought me closer to unconsciousness so I resolved to lie down looking at the ceiling. While a small part of me thought about how she had got here, another wondered whether she was here because of the cocktail of drugs or if she had engrained herself in my mind so deeply that I would never be able to let her go.

“What did you do today? Bite somebody´s ear off to paint your lips with their blood again?” Definitely sounded like something I would do but at that moment I couldn´t really recall it. I just wanted her to keep talking, to still be here when I finally made my way through all the chemicals coating my perceptions. “No, that´s silly of me, you never do the same thing twice. Did you flirt with the blonde doctor again?”

Who was she talking about? Did I have a blonde doctor? I couldn´t remember him. And then the face of a woman came to mind, a pale faced woman who dyed her hair just the right shade of platinum blonde so that it didn´t look like Elsa and so I could stand her presence. I remembered then her laughter when I put the charm on, her painted lips and then I remembered how much I wanted to kill her for almost looking like her but not being her. How I longed to crush her larynx so she would stop talking, how I wanted to kill everyone who thought they could replace her.

She was like Elsa in some aspects, she too had daddy issues only my cellmate had been intelligent enough to see through my antics when I tried to incense her and had put her foot down or fought back and that had been refreshing. She had never backed down, in fact she would push back relentlessly, a fiery look in her icy eyes.  
The scar on my chest pulsed and I recalled the few days we´d had together until I had killed her in which she had been trying to tell me to stop moving around and not exert myself but “subtly”. It hadn´t mattered because I had seen through her as if she had been made of glass and I had known she had had some degree of concern towards me. I reckoned I had got as good a reading on her as she had on me but in the end it had all been for naught. I had still killed her. She was not really with me.

“You are awfully quiet”, she complained and I could picture her frown. “They must have overdone themselves with the dosis. I think they are actually trying to see how much your body can stand. They could kill you if they keep this up”.

I found I didn´t really care at that point. Dying of an overdose had never been how I had imagined my death but still, I had never imagined I would find someone I actually enjoyed spending time with so there was that. 

“Stop moping around”, she whined and I wondered whether I had said that aloud. “Look on the bright side, the pudding here is delicious”.

It was too late for her to try to distract me, I already had the taste of blood on my tongue and the feel of the iron in my hands. I remembered how I felt vindicated while killing her, she had tried to escape one more time, she had been weak, she had thought I hadn´t realized how entwined we had become and she´d thought I would kill her sooner or later because of that. And sure, I knew she had become a small liability, never someone I wouldn´t kill to save myself but maybe someone I would look for after a shootout to see she was still in one piece. I would never spare her if it meant I would die and the same went for her, we were not the self-sacrificing type but there had been an understanding that I would cook her meatballs if she insulted my hospitality and she would tie me to reality when I was lost inside my head.

Only now that I didn´t have her there was no tether to reality, not anymore, and I found I didn´t care about that either. The taste of bile made itself known in my mouth and it slowly dripped down to the padded floor of the cell, I think my body was jerking but then again I couldn´t be sure because I didn´t feel anything besides the metal in my hands and the blood in my mouth of those other girls I had killed much sooner than I had wanted to in the first place because she had run away.

“She´s dead, boss”, a man´s voice I associated with white blonde hair reached my ears with an echo, he had said those words long ago to me but I could still recall them.  
It was then that I had dropped the crowbar coated in thick hot blood from the broken mangled beautiful woman that was lying on the floor, still tied to the chair. It had been that man that had cut her zip ties with tears in his eyes, shoulders shaking and a face that spoke of regret, regret because he hadn´t stopped me and I remember wishing he was dead as well then.

I had then gathered the body of the girl that was in the cell with me in my arms. She had looked so small then coated in the crimson substance that covered everything around her, wounds and gashes everywhere. I took my time closing her eyelids and then painted a smile on her face using her own blood. I hadn´t heard the blonde man as he warned me the police were on their way, I had shut him out. I needed to stay with her and wait until her body grew cold, I owed her that much. Maybe as I was so hot, her body would take a little more to freeze and so maybe I could hold her for a little longer, maybe we would stay in that position, frozen in time forever. Maybe I hadn´t really killed her and maybe this was a dream or a delirium, maybe she was really alive or maybe I had brutalized her body because I had let myself go.

She was the one life I hadn´t wanted to take and yet I had, it only made sense that I be the one to freeze in her cold embrace.

“Are you here to haunt me?” Somehow I knew I had stringed those words together and had said them aloud.

“Actually I am not here for you, there´s another patient who is receiving electro shock right now, I was on my way to him but your hair caught my eye. That and the fact that you look like a starfish right now all splayed out like that", I liked how even in my mind she hadn´t lost her quick wit.

“Why?” I didn´t have enough strength to make a proper question, let her answer what she considered appropriate.

“I don´t know”, she answered, this time honestly. “Do you want me to go?”

If I had been able to scream then I would have, if I could have got up and reached for her hand to tie her to me then I would have too. But as it was, I could only lie there, drugged out of my mind.

“Stay”, was all I managed to get out before my eyes finally closed and I drowned in a drug-induced slumber.


	23. A huge miscalculation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again I am sorry for the late updating. This chapter features a unique duo I quite like writing about, hope you´ll enjoy it!

The door to the soundproof basement opened and Mr. Rinaldi walked through only this time he wasn´t followed by his foul wife and kid. I looked up long enough to identify him but then hang my head, my whole face throbbing from the punches and slaps I´d been subjected to, what a nice family. I was too tired to even laugh at him or smile, my lips were cracked with dry blood and my whole body felt like it was an enormous bruise, probably from the crash where the transport I had been in had rolled over itself a couple times.   
I wondered what that man had up his sleeve, maybe he hadn´t wanted his wife to see what he was going to do to me now. The fact that he was a mob boss in his own right had never left my mind, because even if his daughter had managed to trick him into thinking she was sweet and innocent, I knew this man was one to be fearful of. I was too tired to bother with that pesky emotion too.

Now that they knew I didn´t know anything useful a question begged to be asked: what were they going to do to me now that I had manifested my hate towards their daughter? A thousand tortures sped through my mind in high resolution and in the end I just smiled lopsidedly to myself, I didn´t really care. I knew my Puddin´ would come for me sooner or later and save me from them, maybe he would let me shoot them too.

“Glad to see you still have reasons to smile”, he commented drily as he dragged a wooden chair and placed it in front of me, he sat down.

“I´m going to enjoy the sound your brains will make when I shoot you in the head”, I sing-songed.

He cracked a smile that lacked humor and then cracked his knuckles. My body shuddered despite my efforts to stay still. But he didn´t look like he was about to lunge at me. He looked like a father that was worried about his daughter and the more I looked at him the more I could see beneath his calm exterior and the more cracks I saw in his demeanor. His shoulders were tense, posture stiff, dark shadows under his eyes, cheekbones sharp. This was a man who was sick with worry.

“You claim to know the Joker”, he began and swallowed heavily, looking me in the eye. “Do you think he´d kill my daughter?”

I spat out an involuntary laugh. My shoulders shaking with quiet mirth. He rolled his eyes and let me calm down from my outburst. I had split my lip again and now blood dripped down my chin but I couldn´t care less. What a stupid question.

“Your daughter is no more than dust on his shoe, impertinent and stubborn dust that refuses to go away, sure, but still dust. It is not a matter of “if” but “when”. He´ll look under every rock looking for her”. My voice dripped bitterness at that last admission.

“Why? Why is he so fixated on her?”

I examined him, his face was open and somewhat vulnerable, this was not the big scary bad wolf, this was a scared father. Nothing more and nothing else either. She really had done a number on them, what a masterful artist of deceit.

“This is far from a one-way thing. She feels the same, you should see them together, they´re like an old married couple those two. It´s disgusting if you ask me”.

“You´re far from objective, Miss Queen”.

I laughed at how he had addressed me although I much preferred Misses Joker. That would have to do for the moment. 

“I have no reason to lie”, I shrugged my shoulders as much as I could being tied up. “I have known him for a much longer time and yet…” I shook my head violently, I was not going to cry, not going to cry, not going to. “And yet it was her he looked for after six years of imprisonment, it was her who she talked to at the asylum when he was drugged out of his mind. He thinks I don´t know but I watched the tapes, I watched him lying there almost dying talking to her, I watched…”. My sentence ended in a shrill scream and I shook my whole body trying to free myself but it only brought me more pain which was soothing in itself.

“But they have nothing in common”, his voice broke through my dark obsessive thoughts and I had to laugh again at how clueless he was.

“Oh Thomas”, I purred, “they are two sides of the same coin”.

His eyes opened wide and he immediately shook his head. “That´s a lie”, he muttered.

“I wish it was. And you know the worst thing? She makes him weak!” I spat with hatred. “With her he almost seems human and my Puddin´ is far better than that. He´s still as cruel as always, don´t get me wrong but with her… he has a kind of awareness about her that he doesn´t have about anyone else. And she has less nightmares when he´s around, he helps her come down from them when he´s not fed up with them. Weak animals should be left to die, they´re not aided by predators”.

“My daughter is far from weak, she survived what that monster did to her!” he bellowed, almost spitting in my face. “She was kidnapped for five months, had to sleep on the floor, was tied to a radiator all that time, he almost beat her to death!”

“Oh, yeah, I remember that story”, I laughed sardonically. “Amnesia, was it? I remember her saying that too, how she didn´t remember things due to all the trauma she had been through”, I laughed darkly, my voice getting lower by the second. 

“You seem to be implying my daughter is some kind of twisted evil mastermind”, he sneered disbelievingly but looking into his eyes I saw a spark of uncertainty there. “Let´s say I believe what you´re saying, that they are similar. Would that mean she´s safe with him?”

“Thomas, you should know nobody is safe with him, you said it yourself, he almost beat her to death”.

His frown made an appearance and his eyes sparked with fear and powerlessness. Something in my chest contracted, something I hadn´t felt in a long time, something I thought I would never be able to feel again. There was something in his pinched and pained expression that made my chest ache, I unconsciously knew I had always hoped someone dear to me would have that expression on his face if he ever thought I was in danger or something had happened to me. Memories of my old life were blurry at best but that desire was hard wired into me and now this man before me who hours ago had been questioning me on his daughter´s whereabouts was making this feeling rise up in me. And so I gave in like I would have wanted someone else to do with my own father if they were in the position I was in at the moment.

“I don´t know every revolting detail about their interactions old man”, I began with my head hung and voice low but I could taste his eager anticipation in my tongue. “They have fights sometimes, she is comfortable with two of the henchmen because they were with her the last time too so they are protective of her and have helped her get back into shape but everyone else pretty much despises her. The other men know how pathetic she is with all her screaming at night which pisses them off because they can´t sleep but she stands her ground when they confront her although they always do it when Jay is not around to see it. Those who are especially vexing have a tendency to disappear, he takes care of it”, that´s when my head rose to look into his eyes. “So yes, out of all of us I´d say she´s the one with more chances of survival but not if she has betrayed him again, this time he´ll kill her for good”.

“Why are you suddenly so open and cooperative?” he asked me after the information I had disclosed sank in.

“The way I see it, you´re going to kill me soon or Puddin´ will kill you so either way one of us dies. And I doubt the other will divulge the topic of our conversation or you wouldn´t have come here on your own”.

“For a crazy woman you can be pretty rational at times”.

“I was a psychiatrist, I do know how to fake being sane”, I cackled.

“Fair enough. So tell me Doctor, is he a psychopath?”

“Don´t call him that!” I screamed. “He hates it when people try to label him, trust me, I know. Why does it matter anyway?”

“I´m just trying to understand his motivations to kidnap a young woman for the second time. Correct me if I´m wrong, but he doesn´t have feelings, right? Or at least not as other people would understand them, then what gives?”

“He´s not in love with your daughter if that´s what you´re getting at and neither is she with him for that matter. They´re just making up for lost time or at least they were until she betrayed him once more. The way I see it their time together came to an abrupt end in the past before he was ready to kill her, she forced his hand in a way, so now they are reconnecting”.

“But you are under the impression that he will kill her either way”.

“Just like you are under the impression that your daughter is a victim in all this”, I retorted.

“How long will this reconnecting take?” He chose to ignore my remark and I chose to allow it.

I huffed. “Who knows? Maybe a month, a day, a week or maybe a year. They don´t know it any more than we do, I´ll tell you that much”. Mr. Rinaldi´s face blanched when I said a year and I smiled widely at that.

“How could this happen?” he murmurs to himself.

We were in silence a long while after that admission of weakness, I had to admit to myself that I was sleepy and hurting and I didn´t want to continue this conversation any longer but at the same time it was good to see someone else agonizing over something and not just me being miserable. What power words have.

“I think to him she became her conscience or at least a voice inside his head that he actually listens to from time to time and to her he became her safe haven in a way”.

“Yeah, right”, he snorted. “Do you expect me to believe she is happy with him? With that… creature?”

“I don´t know about happy. I know about alive”. Cue a sharp intake of breath. “How many times dis she try to kill herself after she awoke at the hospital? How many times did you have to sedate her so she´d stop hurting herself? How many periods of not talking did she go through? How many times did you hear her laugh since you got her back?” I kept pressing on, seeing him move his mouth but no sound coming out until he put himself together.

“She was deeply traumatized, it didn´t have anything to do with-

“Him?” I cut him. “Didn´t she ask to see him on a handful of occasions Mr. Rinaldi?”

“The doctors said it was Stockholm´s syndrome, that she had grown so used to his presence around her that she didn´t realize she was safe with her family back home, that she unconsciously thought she would be punished for not being with him and so she needed to see him”.

“Right. And you believed that. It was easier to believe that your genius of a daughter was delusional and so deep inside her own head that she wouldn´t be able to know what was right or not for her safety. That she wasn´t able to see how bonkers her pleadings were. I suppose it was easier to believe that than the actual truth”.

“Which is?” he asked defiantly looking at me through hooded eyes full of mistrust and hatred, begging me to say it out loud. I cackled.

“That she missed him!” I scream in his face leaning towards him. “That for the first time in her life she actually found someone she liked to be around because he was just the same as her!”

“That is not true!” he roared getting up so worked up that the chair slammed against the concrete floor. “My daughter is nothing like that psycho!”

“Do you really believe what you´re saying?” I laughed hysterically. “Or are you just trying to convince yourself because you know that if what I´m saying is true then that means she doesn´t care for you or your stupid family at all? That she actually prefers to be with a convicted criminal than with you who raised her? Does it sting, old man, to know the truth?” 

The slap he gave me resounded in the dark room and even as my lip throbbed and bled I kept laughing, shaking my head. “They even sleep in the same bed”, I groaned, spitting blood on the floor. “Every goddam night”.

“She said he never touched her, am I supposed to believe that was a lie too?” he passed his hand through his hear, ruffling it in desperation.

“He wouldn´t touch her, not without her consent, that is. And especially not because it is her, the one person that doesn´t bend to his orders and threats, the only person he doesn´t mind having around. But once he kills her for good I won´t have to keep living in her shadow and he´ll realize it is me he really wants”.

Elsa´s dad pursed his lips in anger and opened and closed his fits as if he was making a conscious effort not to let go of his control again and hit me. I found it endearing. Jay certainly never held himself back with me. After a while of pacing outside the circle of light the naked light bulb above me provided, all the while looking at me, he knelt down and restored the chair to its place before me.

“Let´s say what you´re saying is not bullshit, that my daughter managed to deceive us all masterfully and that she really is a carbon copy of the clown. Would that be the reason she didn´t divulge much about her kidnapping?”

“She doesn´t like that word, you know. I noticed it when I was in her sessions. Although I admit I don´t remember much about Harleen I recall that much because it always struck her as weird. At first I thought it was because she refused to see herself as a victim and I admired her strength but now I know better, she doesn´t refer to it as her kidnapping but as their time together, that´s pretty telling, don´t you think?” I smiled at him lewdly, batting my eyelashes in a show of coquettishness while he just looked impassively at me, waiting for me to answer his question. He was no fun. “That may have been part of it, yes but it was almost probably motivated by the fact that she knew perfectly well that everything she said about Jay would be used against him at Arkham too. Any insight into his psyche would have been crucial as he always talked circles around all of us, but he never talked about her. I guess it´s one more thing the two of them have in common, they are quite protective of those five months”.

“I wouldn´t expect that chivalry from a terrorist”.

“You´re not a saint yourself old man, may I remind you you are the reason he appeared in your daughter´s life in the first place? And still you raised two children and gave them enough tools to survive in your dark world. You taught them how to fight and most importantly, how to lie. You shouldn´t be so surprised your best student surpassed the master”. I chuckled. “You gave her everything she needed to navigate Gotham´s underbelly and that made her interesting to him, made her survive and yet she still turned against you, how does that feel?”

“I dare say Miss Quinn, there is a huge miscalculation in your reasoning”, he said proudly, standing up and dragging the chair back to the corner of the room.

“And what is that?” I prompted.

“You said it before, the Joker has a knack for killing his men and I can´t help but to link that to the fact that every man who went on that job with you and my daughter is dead, everyone except this mysterious man she ran away with. I know my daughter is a genius and that begs the question, do you actually think she would be thick enough to go behind the Joker´s back with a man she had just met?”

My screams and curses followed him as he shut the door behind him when he exited the room. I screamed so hard my voice became raw and my whole body shook with fury and humiliation. A single tear fell down my cheek until it reached my busted lip and intermingled with the blood there. I watched it splat on the concrete below me, a small splashing sound that made more tears come to my eyes thus creating a small mosaic of bloody tears on the floor around me.


	24. Skewed rationality

“Your parents tell me you´ve been having nightmares lately”, the psychiatrist whose name I couldn´t be bothered to remember commented nonchalantly, like not showing excessive interest in the matter will coax a response out of me, fat chance, I was smarter than that.

Truth was I´d been having nightmares from the first night after waking up at the hospital but I´d been consistently drugged there and so people hadn´t noticed. It wasn´t until I had woken five consecutive nights screaming bloody murder and opened my sutures twice that my family had raised a big red flag. I reckoned it was because the beating had been not that long ago that the pain felt so real, like he was striking me with that crowbar over and over again. The bruises hadn´t even healed yet, much less the more worrying injuries and to my mother´s dismay, I refused to put make up to cover the marks and bruises The psychiatrist had told her it had been because of the negative stigma I had now associated with make up because of who I had been with for the past five months. Truly I had never liked dolling up and now I refused to do it especially because every small movement felt like running a marathon and I just couldn´t be bothered to be left panting trying to cover all my injuries up. I refused to waste hours of my time putting a coat of paint and powder over all my visible injuries to appear more agreeable to others when the truth was I felt battered and bruised.

I wanted my outside to reflect the situation inside me. She had stopped insisting though, fearing she could trigger a traumatic response from me and had hidden all her powders, lipsticks and eye shadows as well. Like that would help me forget the painted face that went with me almost everywhere. I could still picture everything about him so clearly, all his tics and mannerisms, how his eyes narrowed when he was focused on something or the sound of his real laugh when I said something unexpected catching him by surprise and a chortle would ensue, a small sound that had become my favorite in the whole world.

All the experts had agreed that his influence in my life would be long-lasting, that maybe I would never be able to completely erase him because the traumatic events had occurred at a critical time in my development and while I nodded silently with a blank face I was wondering internally why I would want to forget about him. I was mad at him, that was for sure, he´d never taken it that far with me and I was pissed every time I looked at the scars that were forming on my skin but I knew why he had done it. He was sadistic, enjoyed inflicting pain and he had refrained from truly hurting me in a serious capacity for five months and so when I had ran away for completely the wrong reasons he had retaliated in kind and all that restraint had just disappeared and he had got carried away. I wasn´t making excuses for him, in fact, I was planning on giving him a piece of my mind if they ever gave the green light to my visit to Arkham but first I wanted to not be in a wheelchair. I would hate it if he ever got to see me as weak as I was now, especially when mundane tasks required a monumental effort on my part and it was all his fault, I´d make sure he knew that.

But every time I asked how my application was doing, the psychiatrist would look at me funny, no one understood why I wanted to see him and so I correctly interpreted their looks and learnt not to ask about it as it would get me nowhere, only more counseling. The more eager I seemed to see him the more they would deny me the opportunity and so it seems acting aloof was the way to go and it was certainly easier that way, people would murmur about me and give me pitiful looks but I became an expert at ignoring them. I found refuge behind the label ´PTSD´ or ´trauma victim´ at first at least because they would serve to describe anyone that had been through what I had experienced. I had researched the condition and like a perfect mimic I had learned to fake panic attacks and regressions but after a while, those faked episodes became all too real and slowly but surely my condition went downhill. I had always enjoyed being alone because it meant I didn´t have to force my face into an uncomfortable position and I could actually listen to myself think over the constant reminder not to be too callous but know the craving for alone time had become an obsessive and recurrent thought for me. Why would I want to spend time with my dull family when they had nothing to offer me? Before him, my father had been mildly interesting if a bit too trusting when it came to me but now he had nothing that I found remotely attractive, his appeal had vanished. My brother was plainly speaking stupid and he couldn´t stop blaming herself as did my mother who I had always thought was a bitch so that hadn´t changed. If anything they had all turned into whiny little pathetic things. And they wanted me to spend time with them? Ha!

I also had acquired the infuriating habit of looking over my shoulder to see if he was there, walking into a room and scanning the faces in search of facial scars but noting. I guessed when he escaped I would see it on TV but I couldn´t help myself. At the same time, my mind and body resented bright colors like the ones he used to wear as well as the sound of shoes hitting the pavement or raucous laughter because it took me right back to the blood splattered concrete and the crowbar without a fail. But I had discovered that if I inflicted that pain on myself then my mind could stop whirling for a small while, until the next fix that was. If I could control how much pain I was putting into my body and not an outside force then I could marginally cope with my life. So far I had only done a couple of cuts on my arms, my family didn´t know about that yet and that felt good, it was like another secret between us two even if he wasn´t actually here with me, they served to put a wall between myself and everyone else and that was just what I needed, a wall of pain and blood and secrets. And if I wanted out of the suffocating numbness that my life had become then I could always cut a little deeper or slit my wrists or try a cocktail of sleeping pills or jump off buildings… I was getting ahead of myself, that would come in the following years but not just yet. At the moment I was just trying to get through useless therapy sessions without disclosing anything and then going home and locking myself in my room while trying to contain the disgust my family filled me with.

“I guess they were bound to make an appearance sooner or later”, I replied nonchalantly, picking on the scab on my lip to get a small sample of that oh so glorious sting.

“That is a very rational answer. It´s okay to have an emotional response, in fact, it is the most common reaction. Some would even say it serves as a catalyst for all you´re feeling right now. Hiding behind walls of facts and rationality will delay your progress”. I did not care for his chastising tone nor for the fact that he thought I was actually capable of emotional responses.

“I´ve always been a rational person, it is not a façade or an unhealthy way of coping, that´s just who I am. If you don´t like it you could always institutionalize me”. Figuring a way to break out would actually add some color to my days.

“Are you suggesting you´d rather be in a mental hospital?” he was quick to jot down something.

“No”. Yes. “You were the one who was saying I was not approaching this situation as I should, that I should go against my nature and break down crying or scream from the rooftops. Well, I think that would be more telling that something is seriously wrong with me, don´t you think?”

“But isn´t that what you´ve been doing for five nights in a row?” That stung and not in the nice way. Did people feel like this when I didn´t bother to act civilly? He looked cocky and my despise for him grew.

“When you´ve been beaten with a crowbar, then we can talk. Until then you just look overconfident and pretentious”. He at least had the decency to erase his smirk.

“So that is what you dream about? When he almost killed you?” Now because he was trying to sound sincere and coaxing is voice got a bit higher.

And that´s when I realized I had spoken a bit too much but then rationalized it was a normal thing, it wasn´t like he couldn´t have worked it out himself and I felt better.

“Sure”. I agreed, turning pathetically in my wheelchair to look out the window and not at his smug face I saw reflected on the glass as he wrote it down feeling proud of himself. I wondered in passing whether he would frame those notes, the first nugget of information he´d gotten from me.

“That didn´t sound assuring. Is there something more to it?”

“No, that´s pretty much it”, I said dismissively as I wasn´t about to tell him that despite all the nightmares I now had because of him, I still searched everywhere for his face or that I longed to run my hair through his surprisingly soft hair again and certainly not that I longed to feel the rush of another car chase.

“It says in your file that you refused to have a rape test done”, I knew where he was going with that line of questioning and frankly I didn´t care for it. I ran my fingers over the knife hidden under my clothing. “You´ve been adamant to both your family and me about the fact that he never abused you sexually but that doesn´t mean he didn´t touch you or tried to take advantage of you in other ways that don´t require intercourse”.

“Wow, they really must be grasping at straws at Arkham if you´re coming to me for information on him”.

“I´m sorry?” he asked confused.

“I was perfectly clear in previous sessions that I wasn´t willing to talk about that particular topic because I had nothing to say about it. He didn´t rape me nor did he ever attempt to abuse me in any other way. He has never done that, not to me and not to previous hostages, he´s not sexually deviant or lets his penis dictate his actions. You lot must be really hard-pressed to find out anything about him if you try to obtain information from me. What, can´t find a diagnosis that fits him?” I mocked him.

“I think the problem is that there are too many. Psychiatrists at Arkham are baffled by him and his mental state, it´s true that the fact that you are one of the few people who have survived a long stay with him does make you a person of interest in his case but it was not my intention to tease out something out of you. My goal is to help you Elsa, he´s not my patient, you are”.

But I am sure anything and everything I tell you gets dissected by you and your colleagues, trying to read between the lines to see if you can find anything out about him through my experience in his company. I could picture the Joker leading all the doctors in a wild goose chase, exhibiting symptoms of paranoia one day and then changing to schizophrenia the next. The thought about him also being stuck in therapy sessions he didn´t want just like me made me smile but luckily I was facing the window and the doctor didn´t catch the movement.

“By your description of him not being distracted by his desires in the sexual terrain… would that make him a rational person in your eyes?”

Oh God, because I had described myself as a rational person just minutes ago and he had gathered that I saw the Joker as being rational too he was going to ask me now if that is why I thought that I had lasted this long, because at our core we were both guided by facts and figures, not emotions. It was the kind of leap my mind made a thousand times a day that led me to incredible deductions but I was much slyer about it than he would ever be.

“I thought he was insane, not rational”. I bit my tongue after that.

“They´re not necessarily mutually exclusive, his logic may be skewed but it still could be logic”, I could taste how proud he was of himself and it made me sick.

“Then yes, you could say he can be rational”.

“Do you see yourself reflected in him?”

Aaaaand there was my out.

“I beg your pardon?” I colored my question with as much disbelief and rage as I could. And I turned around in my chair just to give it some dramatic flair. “Are you calling me a murderer?”

“No!” he stressed raising his hands in surrender, trying to pacify me but I was sick and tired of him and I wanted out and when I wanted something I got it. “I was just trying to ask if you had reached some kind of understanding between you two, common ground from which to build some kind of rapport even if it was just on an intellectual level”.

“What does that have to do with my nightmares?” I spat at him and I delighted in the fact that spit was flying out of my mouth. It wasn´t classy but it sure as hell did the trick.

“Nothing, or at least not directly. I think talking about your experiences, your trauma, you´ll be able to cleanse yourself of all the unresolved emotions and issues that kame you restless at night and a very important part of it may stem from the relationship between you and your captor”.

“So now we don´t say his name aloud? What is he, Voldemort?” By the way his eyes widened I knew I was on the right path. “Joker, that´s his name, he was my captor as you call it for five months at the end of which he nearly killed me. There, that´s all”.

“Deep breaths, I know this must be upsetting you terribly Elsa but you need to calm down”, he said, standing up to get to me.

“Damn right it is! You have no right to pretend you know anything about me or my relationship with him! No right to force me to dig deep and get it off my chest if I don´t feel like it! Stay away from me!”

I made sure to open my eyes wide to convey rage and agitation, chest bobbing up and down with faked adrenaline and as he took a step forward trying to reach me, I drew out my knife and he scrambled over his seat to get away from the seething teenager in a wheelchair and an arm in a cast that was shooting daggers out of her eyes. Needless to say, he requested I see a different doctor after that session.


End file.
